There are a few things that wings can do that capsules cannot. Shuttle's wing were never actually used for their intended purpose. Wings allow for "once over and return" flights. Shuttle's creators envisioned it launching into a polar orbit, overflying the USSR to [redacted] then land back home without a second orbit. That requires the ability to 'fly' through the atmosphere to make up for the earth's rotation during your orbit. For a vehicle doing multiple orbits, such wings would allow it greater latitude on return. It wouldn't have to wait for its orbit to line up as perfectly with the intended landing site.
"The militarily specified 1,085 nmi (2,009 km; 1,249 mi) cross range requirement was one of the primary reasons for the Shuttle's large wings, compared to modern commercial designs with very minimal control surfaces and glide capability."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
The driving requirement of the Shuttle was that it should be feasible to steal a Soviet satellite sporting unknown new orbital technology, before the Soviets had the opportunity to intervene, and that it be prepared to fly fairly quickly whatever its faults to be ready for potential Soviet expansions into spaceflight as an area of competition.
There were a lot of other requirements and stakeholders that were part of the planning process, and any of them who didn't understand that espionage was a critical component were left wondering why anyone would design such an expensive, impractical failure; Why every stage of the process where it seemed to be unworkable, someone said "Yeah, don't worry about that" and poured money on the problem. Aside from direct requirements, we also encouraged the Soviet Union to spend lavishly copying our design.
By the time the USSR unexpectedly broke up, Energia had just (unsuccessfully) flown a test run with a giant Polyus laser weapon. Mission accomplished, right? But we didn't then want all of the Soviet scientists to spread to the winds and start building ICBMs for anyone who could pay. We needed them to stay in Russia until Russia could become a solvent, stable state.
So we said "What sort of international cooperative effort could we use a whole bunch of Shuttle AND Soyuz flights for?" and designed (or adapted) a space station around that requirement. We decided to revamp Reagan's ill-fated "Space Station Freedom" program into the ISS.
That's the only reason we didn't retire the Space Shuttle long before the Columbia.
That's completely wrong. There was no serious consideration of stealing Soviet satellites. Everyone knew that we'd never be able to get away with that.
The driving requirement was to act as a successor to the SR-71. Launch, make a single reconnaissance pass over the Soviet Union, and then utilize the cross-range capability to land immediately so that the film could be developed. But by the time the Shuttle was actually built, spy satellites equipped with digital cameras had improved so much that it became moot.
You don't need something a tenth the size of the Shuttle to be an effective manned camera platform, even an effective manned camera platform with extreme cross-range.
We had effective unmanned film camera platforms in space long before we had CCDs, long before the Shuttle was contemplated.
> During the 1950s, a Soviet hoax had led to American fears of a bomber gap. In 1968, after gaining satellite photography, the United States' intelligence agencies were able to state with certainty that "No new ICBM complexes have been established in the USSR during the past year."[10] President Lyndon B. Johnson told a gathering in 1967:
>> I wouldn't want to be quoted on this ... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor.[10]
Yes a manned camera platform could have been much smaller than the shuttle. And the USAF had been designing just such a vehicle until they were forced to consolidate their program with NASA's Shuttle in order to "save money". So we ended up with a compromised vehicle that was too expensive and couldn't do anything very well.
If the Russian satellite is a secret, and the Americans steal it secretly, then of course they would get away with it. It's like a thief stealing from another thief.
Nobody seriously though Shuttle could bring back a hostile spacecraft. The logistics of such a thing are ridiculous. What Shuttle could have done was to bring back friendly sats. The only friendly sats worth bringing back would be something that couldn't be allowed to re-enter. The only things that couldn't ever be allowed to re-enter would be something nuclear, either a reactor or a bomb. Shuttle was envisioned as a system for maintaining some sort of nuclear tech in orbit. That never happened, but the worry that it would was a driving force behind Buran.
Such a system could orbit a number of times during maintenance operations of friendly satellites; It would not need the cross-range that the Shuttle was built for.
I get a lot of "Nobody seriously thought this", but the high cross-range required of single-orbit-and-land is the long pole in the tent that stretches the rest of the requirements; It's not a reasonable tradeoff unless espionage was a use-case that could not be ruled out.
Without the requirement to land a large cargo bay with an extreme cross-range, the optimal design looks nothing like the Shuttle. The Shuttle cost an order of magnitude more than that optimal design.
"The militarily specified 1,085 nmi (2,009 km; 1,249 mi) cross range requirement was one of the primary reasons for the Shuttle's large wings, compared to modern commercial designs with very minimal control surfaces and glide capability." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle