.... I do like the shx better .... because I could control width factor with greater precision and boldness with pen weight.
Exactly.
I can have one style, with one font, and have an almost infinite choice of combinations of text height and thickness (pen width), whereas TTF pen widths are limited. You want text Arial text 2" high with a pen width of 0.005"? Forget it. You want Calibri 0.08" high and a pen width of 0.028"? Forget it.
With TTF, you end up having one style for regular text, one for
BOLD text and one for Narrow text and even more if there are other variations of the font available.