I agree that complex bit hacks makes code less readable and should be avoided. But that's not necessarily what we're talking about here. Most common uses I see of shift operators tend to do the opposite: they make what you are doing more explicit when you do bitwise operations.

If flipping the Nth bit inside an integer or a byte array is an "advanced" technique, unfit for "application programmers" then I'm not sure I want to work with "application programmers".