Shared hosting is hard. Been there, it sux; you have to keep everyone happy with multiple versions of everything. By the end of it, it will look like the primordial soup.
Whoever manages to do it and remain sane has my respect; shared hosting can still make quite a bit of money.
Personally I'd like to see stuff like Openshift[1] take off, maybe with a nice interface in front of it so it won't scare off "CPanel" users. It sounds like a nice compromise between shared hosting and "VPS".