What if they had…?

As we all know the transporter in star trek was a work-around introduced due to budget constraints, but imagine, if you will, that they just cut between shots & talked about shuttles etc.

My question is this: how essential are transporters to Star Trek? Personally I think not too much - some episodes would need reworking to get ‚to the shuttle‚ rather than getting transporters to lock on - whilst others would be lost (using the transporter to heal people, for eg) but other than that I think the impact would be minimal. Sure O’Brien have been chief shuttle pilot rather than transporter chief etc … but what do you think?