If you can get a Cat5 from Vera to somewhere within 70ft of all of the shades, then you might consider an URTSII and go Vera to USB to RS232 to DB9 to RJ45 to CAT5 to URTSII and get a reliable wired connection all the way out to being close to the shades controlled via RTS.
The ZRTSI will have the Z-Wave issues you mention, but those may be able to be fixed by manually assigning its neighbor nodes or adding lamp modules to extend the Z-Wave signal. RTS is limited to around 70ft on average but can go as high as 100ft, it depends since RF actually stands for Really Funny as you never know what may be interfering with the signal. Most of the time there won't be any problems, but when there are they are real head scratchers.
A good test if you already have an RTS remote control is to see where that works and wherever works then you know the interfaces should work in the same location. The FCC regulates the power of their RTS transmitters so they all have about the same power with a couple exceptions. Actually the single channel RTS interface is just the guts of a handheld remote with wires soldered to the contacts on its circuit board, so if you want to sacrifice or upgrade your existing remote you can use it as a dry contact interface (see attached picture).
To summarize the ZRTSI should have the same range as the URTSI, but the URTSI does away with the Z-Wave element. The single channel RTS interface is just a handheld remote basically so it doesn't have a larger, detachable antennae that the URTSI and ZRTSI have but should have similar RTS range. PM me if you need any help.
