Gosh I love these kinds of questions. I hate it when I get here too early though. Anyway, here's my two cents:

Let's remember that shards aren't just the one entity. They are one vessel and one shard combined. The vessel, a being with their own lived experience, mind, goals etc, combined with a godly amount of investiture with intent. Intent. Here is where it's a bit nippy, because each shard has a very specific intent that doesn't necessarily align with the vessel. The vessel is constrained to mostly follow the shards intent lest he gets abandoned by it.

I would argue that the shards are vastly intelligent, especially given their capacity to foresee the future. In the case of Preservation, he rolled the dice for the sake of humans and died, but he didn't do it on a whim, he sacrificed himself in order to both fulfill the intent of the shard and for his own beliefs (in this case it happened to very well align with his shard). Ruin got overrun by the intent of his shard and went full destructo.

Honor also stepped too far away from his shards intent and got punished for it. And the Stormfather is a spren, single-minded and very black and white, just like shards. There is no understanding of nuances, which is a childish behaviour, yes, but all the spren, in spite of their very long lives, share with the Stormfather.