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Kind of late in the discussion, but, the whole point of having shear pins(or bolts) is so that if too much force is put onto a system. The shear pin fails before some other expensive or difficult to replace component does, such as the square tube drive shaft twisting into a pretzel, breaking off of gear teeth, ripping the walls away from the floor, etc. As an integral step of the design and engineering stage of almost anything mechanical, there is some level of testing and failure analysis, and making changes to a portion of the design can lead to catastrophic results.
MIMF has said that Lippert seems to be supplying longer grade 8 bolts as replacements, so the shank portion is bearing at the shear line of the two parts. This would lead me to believe that everything is designed to still work as planned. Most likely, some accountant at Lippert said, "If we use these shorter bolts, we can save $200,000 over the life of this product, vs. using the longer bolt.".
I'm not so sure that replacing a shear pin with something stronger is necessarily a wise thing to do in other applications. It's kind of like replacing a 10 amp fuse that keeps blowing out with a 50 amp fuse. Yeah, sure, your fuse will quit blowing, but if there is some reason (like an electrical short) the 10 amp fuse was failing, you just might have all of your wiring catch fire if the system is designed to be loaded at 10 amps or less. "Bigger, stronger, more, faster." is not always the way to make things better.
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