At the risk of being a negative nelly, the Soyuz design is even older, and overall probably fundamentally safer. Also, the Shuttle is only ostensibly "reusable", in reality every single flight required months of refurbishment which included meticulous inspections of the TPS tiles, complete replacement of the payload bay liner, complete purging of all fuel in the system, and even replacement of the engines.

We certainly learned a lot from Shuttle operations but in terms of spacecraft design mostly we learned what not to do.