personally, I do not mind the shift-enter.
The "old" version required two characters also. the first character was
; or $. The second character was <enter>.
If you allow only <enter> to submit the command, then all commands must
be one-line long, or you need another
character sequence to continue a long command. In some systems this is
two characters \ <enter> .
I think that wxmaxima should behave somewhat differently in "batch"
mode... it seems to display the results
even if the commands in the file are terminated by $.
Also, as I've mentioned, the front-end seems to get "clogged" and slow
down, especially if you have some long
text from the manual in your notebook.
RJF