You're a hard man to please, CFC!
The thing with good fish shops is you can have ones that give good care to ordinary and newbie fishkeepers, and you can have stores that get in a ton of cool, unusual stuff. Rarely do the two overlap, in my experience.
I've been to fish shops that had really boring stock compared with what I'd like to keep -- but they care about their customers, and only stock sensible community fish that will get along with the minimum of fuss.
The shops that most often have the cool cichlids and catfish and oddballs are often the ones that either don't know what they're selling (e.g. "freshwater flatfish") or else prefer to cater to clients who know what they're doing and won't need much hands-on help. Some of the best fish I've bought have been from really rubbish tropical fish shops.
If I had to choose, I'd sooner more shops gave good advice, stocked sensible community species, and spent time with newbies explaining things like filters carefully. Conversely, it's a lot of the shops experienced aquarists like that seem to import the giant catfish, fish that come from fish farms, impossible-to-keep-alive characins, butterflyfish that only eat corals, and so on.
Cheers,
Neale