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As to what the shaft does for any shot, first of all, the shaft is NOT the engine of the club. In a "car analogy" it is more like the TRANSMISSION because it delivers the force/energy/work from the golfer to the ball through the clubhead. Many times I have proved this to golfers or clubmakers by building them two clubs to hit - one with the perfect clubhead specs for their swing/manner of play but with a completely wrong shaft, and the other with a perfectly fit shaft mounted to a clubhead with totally wrong specs for how they swing and play. In hitting the two clubs, sure, the one with the totally wrong shaft won't FEEL as good, but from a PURE PERFORMANCE standpoint, the golfer will hit the ball more consistently solid, farther and straighter with the perfect clubhead/wrong shaft than with the perfect shaft, wrong clubhead. This point is NOT done to make the golfer play with a club that has the right head and wrong shaft - it is only offered as a point to realize that it is the WHOLE GOLF CLUB and all its components and specs that makes it work well or not for any golfer.

Performance wise you have these elements only which are controlled by the shaft -

1. The shaft is THE main contributor to the total weight of the golf club and from that, has a relationship to the swing speed and on center consistency of the shot
2. Partial contribution with the loft/CG of the head to the launch angle of the shot - but only for golfers with a later release of the wrist cock angle and not for golfers with an early release.
3. Partial contribution to the accuracy of the shot from the relationship of the shaft's torque to the downswing force of the golfer - again here is a case where for torque to cause an accuracy problem, it requires a certain type of swing to do that.

The shaft does not SPEED UP the clubhead. The shaft does not work in a BUGGYWHIP action to "slingshot" the ball farther. But because golfers have hit clubs with different shafts and PERCEIVED that it has done these things, it's now time to bring in that aspect of shaft FEEL.

The better the golfer's swing moves, the more the golfer has played and hit shots and reacted to what they feel, the more the FEEL interacts with the golfer's brain to cause swing changes that may or may not be positive to the shot. How many of you have hit a club where you perceive the shaft to be either too stiff or too flexible so you know to hit the ball decently, you have to make a different swing move of one sort or the other. Shaft feels too stiff and most of us will try to swing harder to make that shaft FEEL and perform like we would like it to feel when we know we hit a great shot. Shaft feels too flexible and most of us try to "slow down" the swing to make the shaft FEEL and perform like we want it to feel.

If the shaft is too light and results in a total weight or swingweight that is not matched well to our swing, again, we have to make swing changes to try to get to that point where we can hit the club ok. Same thing with a shaft that is too heavy. In the end, if we perceive that we ARE making bad swings just to try to make the shaft perform as we want, we dump the shaft and call it a "BAD SHAFT", when in reality it is just the "WRONG SHAFT" for that golfer.

When you've seen a golfer change shafts and end up with a higher swing speed, it is because of what the shaft did to the overall total weight, MOI of the club combined with what it did to the club's overall and total feel and how the golfer reacted to that. Not because the shaft "buggywhipped" more through the ball. So from a FEEL standpoint, yes, we cannot ignore this with golfers who have a pre-disposition to be able to identify "good shaft feel" and "bad shaft feel" because if we don't address this in the shaft fitting, we are pushing the golfer into making more bad swings as they struggle to make the club feel like they want it to feel when they hit the ball well. Some of these swing changes are very subtle and happen almost sub-consciously, but they are a part of the "cause and effect" of shaft fitting for a lot of golfers. Not all, but a lot.

Yes too to the point that some shafts' specifications are just not well matched to our swing moves and thus PERFORM wrong - the classic example of a shaft that is too flexible somewhere in the shaft for a certain swing type and results in too high of a shot or too much of a "ballooning" high spin shot because of the way the shaft bent forward too much coming into impact and delivered the clubhead to the ball with too much dynamic loft and from that, too much spin. or the shaft that is too stiff somewhere in the shaft and won;t bend forward enough at impact to combine with the loft and CG of the head to generate a high enough launch angle to achieve best distance.

Another thing that makes shaft fitting too much of a trial and error situation and thus contributes to this confusion is that we do not yet have a SIMPLE manner of being able to really convey the possible bending differences of different shaft designs to the many different swing types out there. Yes, we have software now in the industry with which we can look at one form of stiffness measurements over the length of shafts and see a graph of the distribution of stiffness for any shaft. From that we can overlay these graph lines and see that one shaft is stiffer in different parts of the shaft and by how much. But for now that is really only good to be able to identify what the bend profile looks like for a shaft the golfer loves or hates so we can then judge whether a different shaft the golfer may be interested in will be close to or not close to what they like. That's great because if used it can keep a golfer from shelling out money for a shaft they are interested in trying but may not have the same bend profile as one they like now. But for pure, "here's your swing and here's the ONE shaft for that swing" - nope, we don;t have that nailed down perfectly. We can get real close to that based on our knowledge of different bend profile designs in shafts vs what we know about the swing moves that generate more or less bending force on the different parts of the shaft. But it ain't cut and dried completely yet. So we keep 'hunting' and being confused as we do.