I agree with you that shadow offers compelling gameplay that’s unmatched in the game (or it’s history in the 12 years I’ve played) Sadly the state of alpha is the worse than 8.0 was; or a 440 character would be.
I’d recommend to you (and anyone else reading this thread) to give Ryeshot’s optimizer a spin and see what u think about his latest template. There’s a dedicated thread for that here: Sensible Shadow Feedback
His template has a different version of devouring plague and some additional tweaks to shadow and voidform baseline that do improve the spec greatly imo.
I highly suggest reading his articles as well.