To me, down playing 4 Hart Trophies seem to suggest the hockey community at that time didn't understand their own game. As if they should have looked at it like modern experts. Even though it was much easier to view all the players in the league at that time. And the Bruins did win two Cups with Shore and had notably weaker seasons when he was injured.
I view the fall of Eddie Shore as an injustice.
I disagree that Shore's Harts have been downplayed. Rather, I think they were previously viewed with a modern lens, whereas now we have complete/mostly complete voting results and are better able to understand the differences in voting trends as they changed over time.
The Hart has, with the odd exception, been awarded to the player who had the best season for the last 40 years or so. It's pretty much a "best player in the NHL" award except in cases where somebody dragged a weak team into the playoffs (Theodore, Hall).
It's pretty clear though that the original definition "most valuable to his team" was taken a lot more seriously by voters from Shore's era. And defensemen featured very prominently in the voting up until the war. Since then, it is very rare for defensemen to get any consideration for the award.
So from a 2008 perspective, you have a player that won 4 Harts, but incredibly he did so as a
defenseman. Bobby Orr himself only won 3 Harts. No other defenseman has ever won it twice. Eddie Shore must have been dominating games in an Orr-like fashion to get this sort of recognition...
...but wait, a decade's worth of subsequent research has revealed that defensemen actually dominated Hart voting up until the war.
It's certainly possible we're misinterpreting the voters of the past, and that they did indeed vote for the Hart in a similar manner as voters today, but I find it extremely unlikely. Of course none of us were there, but it just seems really hard to believe that Herb Gardiner was actually seen as the best player in the league in 1926-27. Or that Lionel Hitchman was arguably the best in 1930 after narrowly finishing in second place (his teammate Shore outscored him 31-9 in points that year, interestingly enough). Lionel Conacher has a pair of runner-up finishes. He was traded directly after the first of those instances, and his replacement on the Chicago defense (Art Coulter) proceeded to suddenly finish a strong third in voting for the trophy. Babe Siebert, after putting together a solid but otherwise unspectacular ten year career until his early 30's, suddenly wins the Hart and finishes third the following year. These are just some of the instances where pre-war Hart voting just doesn't seem to correlate with a player's overall ability to nearly the extent that it does today.
This isn't to say Shore doesn't still have an argument to be placed higher than he was, I think he does. But his previous ranking was definitely built upon the foundation of those 4 Harts, and we now have discovered ample reason to believe they aren't as suggestive of an Orr-level defenseman as we thought they were in the past.