Traffic shaping for download (WAN->LAN) traffic for Internet connections is fairly pointless in most cases. Really, all you can control is which traffic exits your LAN interface first which, for home/SOHO use, is not typically bandwidth constrained. Since you must accept traffic from your ISP in whatever order your ISP chooses to send it to you (FIFO), there isn't much, if any, benefit to be had. A caveat for pfSense is that you must have at least one WAN->LAN rule or the traffic shaper generator script breaks.
For upload (LAN->WAN) of course, traffic shaping is extremely useful.
Also, instead of rebooting the entire firewall, just reset states. Diagnostics, States, then click the Reset states tab. This will interrupt all established traffic flows, and when you reconnect they should fall into the right queues. You need to do this because applying a new traffic shaper policy doesn't affect connections that have already been established, only new connections.