We'd like the Recipient Shipping Total field (on the Shipping Page) to be changeable by the operator.
There are times when we upgrade a multi-receiver shipment to a faster, more expensive delivery service, but we only want to charge the ground service rate. We make the adjustment on the Money page, but the Recipient Shipping Total field shows the upgraded service rate charge, which in turn is what prints on the customers invoice, creating confusion for the customer.

I understand the challenge here. At the moment there isn’t much you could do other than:
1) adjusting the order’s shipping charge (as you are doing now)
or
2) adding a shipping credit line-item for that recipient. Such a product would have a negative price and you’d probably also set it up to be excluded from spending tables so that shipping discount does affect their shipping charge in the spending table.
Example – http://screencast.com/t/tKOhKzfcgN
and – http://screencast.com/t/gliRSS4Xt0
The feature request here will be to treat recipient shipping charges like order level shipping charges, allowing a manual override, ideally with a URL-like link that could be clicked to reset it back to the CMS calculated charge, again like is currently done for the main shipping charge on the Money tab of Order Entry.