As the current RC judge, I will say that I try to focus purely on the content of the role.

HOWEVER...

If you were to play a shifter without a role for a few dozen hours, make it to hero, without every really roleplaying or developing your character at all, and then suddenly enter a massive role out of nowhere, it would probably bother me.

Conversely, there are a lot of players who enter 10 chapters at level 1, play 200 hours, and then roleplay incredibly generically/without mention of or texture from said role, and never enter another update indicating any milestones or development like cabal inductions, religion, etc. That also bothers me.

For better or for worse, shifters have a very unique mechanic of randomness. If you want to play a shifter without getting invested until you get your final form, then why would you want to play a shifter at all? Playing 30-40 hours to rocket to hero only to delete sounds absolutely miserable to me. I would never want to encourage that.

You could just as easily play a druid and get a guaranteed OK air form and damn decent offensive form, plus some beefy supplications and other fun mechanics to boot. Or you could play a tailor-made warrior and get exactly what you want out of it.

So, the short answer is that I might be sympathetic to your plight on some level, but I would not hold shapeshifters to a lower role or roleplay standard than anyone else because of mechanics inherent to the class.