Personally I greatly prefer, and only use, DaBrain's 2D shockwave (the blue one) and don't really like the 3D versions at all. I don't want to get into a debate on personal taste though. I do want to touch on one thing that I'm not sure too many people are fully realizing...
The general idea when texturing a ship model is to use as few textures as possible on it. I think everyone gets that at this point. But the thing is that a 3D shockwave is a model too, only in this case you aren't using 1 texture, or even 10 textures, but 160 of them. For a ship that uses animated textures, each frame of that animation is also a texture, so you have to add them all into the texture usage. They may not all be rendering at the same time (for the same frame render of one model at least), but they do still all have to be loaded at the same time. I'm simplifying the analogy a bit, but the basic idea is the same.
I don't think it's fully possible to have really good looking 3D shockwaves at this point in time. We could do more with it, perhaps expanding on the idea of the new secondary weapon transparency effect, to make a shockwave have settable alpha setting at the start and end of it's run. Model transparency should mostly get rid of the seams, and mixing that with cycling texture transparency could give an enhanced visual effect without having to use new animation frames to do the same thing. Perhaps this would allow a better looking spherical shockwave and maybe even reduce the number of required animation frames.