Agreed, the current semantics of the Smart Home skill framework are less than ideal for shades. It's interesting to think about how to effectively control shades. Especially if they've got more than one range of motion. I've got a number of them that have BOTH top-down and bottom-up opening. For regular, one-direction kinds of shades you can think of how much they're open as a percentage of how much visibility/light they let through. As in, 100% is totally open (allowing all light to pass) and 0% is totally closed (passing no light). So it would seem reasonable to control those in the same way you'd control a light dimmer.
Then there's the question of how to interact with scenes. As in, a stored collection of settings for the devices. I use scenes for my Hunter Douglas shades and have them controlled on schedules. Basically four main types, Night, Day, Privacy and Open. Where Night and Open are totally closed/open. Privacy is a setting most useful for the top-down variety, providing an open portion in the top allowing daylight but blocking view of occupants. Day is typically "let a lot of light into the room without worrying about privacy". For some south-facing windows I have a few other schedules set up to adjust positions based on the Sun. Which is kind of problematic when it comes to seasonal changes. Right now I have to manually change the scenes. At some point I'd very much like to have actual light-detection involved.
Personally, I think scenes have been a long-neglected aspect of HA. They're "too hard to set up". And then they're required too many resources to control them (aka dedicated buttons, or tedious touchscreens). Voice control can take away the requirement of dedicating buttons but then you're still stuck with what kind of user interface is ideal for configuring them. Right now nobody's framework is dealing with this effectively for homeowner setup/editing.
