Sort:  

You have the benefit of a real exchange and can decide what you want. And since I have tried it some times now, the price mimics Poloniex. It does not get much better. The beginers should learn to use the exchange to get the most out of their funds. And BTS is a good bet. Especially for the Steem/BTS cross. The DEX might look daunting in the begining. But it has far too many benefits to be overlooked. Giving money to shapeshift is for the impatient.

Well , I agree with you, I like DEX , and I use it very often
But , even people who have been mining since early btc times and have a reasonable knowledge of the blockchains , find hard sometimes to make a AltCoin /AltCoin conversion
An I find shapeshift the simpliest way
Anyway,this tool was an experiment , I wanted to learn how to link stuff
I will work next on linking steemjs with bitsharesjs to exchange Steem for other coins using DEX ,or any other idea I find , hopefully at the end I will get something useful :)