Well for me I'm just grateful that it has a name. It has to be called something I guess.
I've had problems with it in some situations since I was about 7 and I'm 33 now. That's a long time to think that you are a freak but you can't work out why and to feel like you're totally alone in this weirdness and suffering. I'd rather have a clumsy label than no idea what was wrong and what I could do about it.
Social phobia is shorter to write and say (which is why I tend to use it more). And people do know what phobias are, (although they may not understand the difference between being a bit afraid or nervous about something and having an irrational and nearly uncontrollable reaction despite everything you try and do to stop it). It does associate the problem with other phobias which I think might help understanding.
Social anxiety disorder indictes nicely that this problem is an extension of something that is normal and in fact healthy (some anxiety in some social situations) that has gone over a line to where it is enough of a problem to be labelled "disorder". I don't like the abbreviation SAD because there is seasonal affective disorder as well.
If you take the word social out, there is a difference between saying you have a phobia and saying you have an anxiety disorder. Saying you have a phobia means you are afraid of a specific thing. Saying you have an anxiety disorder implies to me that you have an ongoing and general problem managing anxiety.
As a general term I think that anxiety disorder is better for me than phobia - I seem to have had a succession of phobias of different things. So I might have an individual phobia (or 2 or 3...) at any one time, but overall, I seem to have an ongoing problem managing anxiety. I put all this work into beating one fear, and then I find that there is something else that has developed that is just as bad. I've had several different social things, some which I have beaten and some which I haven't yet, as well as non-social phobias.
Incidentally, I don't know that social phobia is more debilitating than other phobias, but it must be the hardest to treat because you cannot control your exposure to the things that cause anxiety (WHY OH WHY won't people behave in a reliable and predictable manner at all times... :? oh dammit, it's because we're human not robots).
As long as nobody ever tries to put the word "personality" in front of the word "disorder" and label me with it, I'm reasonably happy. I've always disliked that term.