Hi friend, it's very helpful if you could please post the .3dm model file of your objects instead of only a screenshot.

For example in this case I would have been able to test with your objects and that may have helped me notice that you wanted a steeper angle result.

So yes Shell produces lofts that are aligned with the surface normals.

If you wanted to do Loft then a quicker way than doing Loft many times would be to use Edit > Join so you had 2 curves which each were made up of 8 segments. Then you can loft between those 2 joined curves. When there are the same number of segments in each curve that will be the equivalent of doing each loft individually between segments.

Another way that might be useful would be to make a planar tapered extrude and then beam that onto your sphere using projective Flow. Position the base plane for the flow a little ways inside the shape so that when it's projected the top surface doesn't try to skim directly along the sphere surface because that then makes for difficult booleans.

So that would look like this:

Create planar curve:



Extrude tapered:



Create base plane for flow positioned like this:



Flow with "Projective" option:



Boolean difference:



- Michael