What you are actually trading
Length buys reach at the net and on the stretch, and it adds leverage, which is felt as extra power on a drive and extra spin on a roll. That is genuinely useful and it is why singles players gravitate to it.
The cost is not subtle. The same mass spread over a longer face means a narrower sweet spot, and it moves toward the tip. Contact low on the face, where a lot of resets and dinks land, is noticeably deader than on a wide body.
Which one your misses are telling you to buy
If you are frequently catching the ball off center and feeling it, a standard shape will help immediately and an elongated one will make it worse. Reach cannot compensate for missing the middle.
If you are consistently finding the middle and losing points because you could not get to the ball, or because your drives lack bite, length is the upgrade.
Hybrid shapes exist precisely because most people are between the two, and they are a reasonable answer when you genuinely do not know.
Shape interacts with weight, and that trips people up
Two paddles of identical stated weight can swing completely differently depending on where the mass sits, and an elongated shape moves mass away from your hand by definition. That is why an elongated paddle almost always feels heavier in play than the number on the listing suggests.
The practical consequence: if you are moving from a standard shape to an elongated one, going up in weight at the same time is how people end up with a paddle that is slow at the net and blame the shape for it. Change one variable.
If you already play an elongated paddle and want more pace, added weight at the head does more than a stiffer face will. If you play one and keep arriving late on speedups, the fix is usually less swing weight rather than a different shape entirely.
Shape and used condition
Elongated paddles take their knocks on the top edge, because that is the part that meets the court on a low dig and the part that catches on everything. Check the edge guard for lifting at the corners first on any used elongated paddle.
Beyond that, shape does not change how a paddle ages. This is a fit question, which makes the secondhand market the sensible place to answer it. Trying an elongated shape used costs a fraction of finding out at retail that you do not get on with it.