"(bordering on being over customizable)"
I personally agree with that statement. It's hard to balance between letting people do what they want with their data/views and providing it in the way that we know works. What would Steve Jobs do here?
I think it's just the way the app was designed, meant to share certain views that Administrators .. administer. There have been others who desired that lockdown so people couldn't "mess up" what they'd shared. I suppose it can go either way.
Now we at least have other options for sharing views that we didn't have before, even when the Custom List app came out. Work Views, for instance, is a huge upgrade to Custom List. Sure it's still got some work to do, but the ability to share multiple views of data and have it show up on an actually performant page is a huge improvement. At least one can show/hide columns on a shared view if they want to. If they want to save that change to their own view in Work Views, they certainly can!
I'm still working to switch all my Custom List views over to Work Views, and can't wait for custom filter logic to be added so I can finish the transition.