I have never had any issues with getting Widget Context to properly show or hide widgets on a specific page. If you install the Shaper in another location temporarily and go through some of hte widgets, you should be able to see how it is used for the demo content.
I always use the wildcard method. I also have the "post-name" permalink structure. For example, if I want the Accordion Menu widget to only show on the page that talks about it, I use *accordion-menu* as the URL target in the Widget Context settings.
I'm not exactly sure why the other widget hiding plugins don't work correctly with TabShow, but it is most likely because TabShow (and any other S5 widget that has sidebar positions) adds its own sidebars at a different time in the site load process (it has to, or the positions would be above the main site positions), and because of the timing, some of the Widget Context style plugins can't properly detect the plugin-created positions.
What exactly seems to be the problem with Shortcodes Ultimate? The framework has quite a few shortcodes of its own that I've added, but there shouldn't be any conflicts unless it's trying to add shortcodes with the same name, and even then, it should just override the existing ones. You can find the complete list of shortcodes for this theme
on this page of the demo.As it says on the demo:
There are many shortcodes available for use in this theme, and more will be added to the framework over time. Use [describe_shortcodes] for a full list, and [describe_shortcodes help] to show the list with additional help with the more complicated ones.