FFVI Worlds Collide

I've watched a few different runs and floated about the community listening to feedback and experiences for a bit now, and I've found the main sources of difficulty for players(and these are using runs with Shuffled shops, not Random shops, so these runs typically don't have Paladin Shlds) are one or more of the following:
-physical attacks from bosses that are a high level for one reason or another, and are physical attack heavy, like Doom or Umaro
-Goddess's Quasar
-Sleep's Meteo
-Tier 2 in general
-powerful Monster-in-a-Boxes

So for these examples, which are hopefully indicative of the larger whole, and not also a skewed sample size:
-For physical attacks, Paladin Shld does help, but not notably more so than any other high powered shield(except Force Shld lel)
-For Quasar, Paladin Shld does literally nothing
-For Meteo, Paladin Shld helps, but no more than an Aegis Shld would, and less than a Force Shld
-For Tier 2, Paladin Shld helps quite a bit
-For powerful MiaBs, Paladin Shld helps a lot, but most people ignore them anyways, and they're not necessary to beat either

As such, most of the runs I've seen would not benefit too drastically from a free Paladin Shld plopped in there all of a sudden.

On another note, Random shops are only the default option on the Very Easy preset(as of version 0.3.2), with the other presets having the Original or Shuffle options by default instead. Naturally, switching the Random option on is a big deal(alongside not switching on the No Priceless Items option), because having access to essentially every item in the game is a very powerful tool indeed. The nature of the flag itself dictates that it will be vastly more important than most of the minor flags and a couple of the major ones