I agree that tc is not a very good user interface, but I'm not sure I agree with you that IPTables is. Consider http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html#allrules - a nice configuration language does look better than a shell script.
So yeah, the script is very small. But why is it? Because aliases are used everywhere. Over simplifying things. When you read it, you don't know what it does. When you read the 3 pages of explanations, you get the idea, but you still don't know exactly what it does.
At least with iptables you do. And you can match virtually anything (like a bit in a packet if you like)
