The only thing that really bothers me personally about shorteners is not knowing where I'm going to end up, and not being able to identify articles I've read be

The only thing that really bothers me personally about shorteners is not knowing where I'm going to end up, and not being able to identify articles I've read before. A shortener with a dedicated domain and user-chosen ids should cover that just fine. The only outstanding issue in the article is a single extra DNS lookup, which is pretty minor compared to the massive chains which were causing the problem.