I'm more than ok with normal arrows, but do find the elementals useful. Here's a little more insight to my thoughts:
1. Normal arrows do plenty of damage, especially with face shots and multi-arrow bows. They also don't cause any "commotion" around the area you shoot, so nothing is ever obstructing your view of what you're shooting at, especially when you're in slow-mo bullet-mode.
2. Ice arrows are great for crowd control, but in master mode once enemies are mostly leveled up, the freeze effect doesn't last all that long, and basically is useless against gold enemies, so to me those arrows lose quite a bit of their worth. Also, I don't like that the "ding" impact sound of the ice arrows because it's too similar to the "ding" of the head/face shot... makes it harder to know if you actually got the 2x damage headshot in, or if you missed.
3. Fire Arrows are great, but again don't find they do a whole lot more than normal arrows - at least on enemies. Helpful, yes ... but not some huge boon in terms of damage. They are, by far, most useful for starting a quick fire under you to use for an up-draft ... or shooting bomb barrels to blow up enemy camps (more on bombing enemies in moment) ... or just quickly melting ice blocks in the Hebra or Gerudo Highland areas. I find these more useful than ice arrows by a long shot.
4. Shock Arrows are nice, and are GREAT for "fishing" or going after enemies in the water. The huge Area of Effect is awesome. I'd have to say these are my favorite of the elemental arrows.
5. Bomb Arrows are amazing, but the more I play the game, the less I use them. I find they are too powerful, and also too messy. If you shoot a 3/5 shot bow with bomb arrows into an enemy camp, stuff goes flying EVERYWHERE. Now, it gets harder to hurt multiple enemies at one time, and they re-group too quickly if you enter the camp to start fighting them one at a time. And, all the "stuff" or "drops" that were there in the camp have been blown away. My favorite use for bomb arrows is when running around, or gliding around ... if I see some rocks you can break, I go into bullet-time and bomb-arrow them. Saves time from landing and using normal bombs.
6. Ancient Arrows ... what to say here? I keep about 20 with me at all time, just in case I feel like being a jerk and abusing them. But, by and large these things are a last resort, and they are truly unfair for everything other than the flying guardians. Even if you can perfect-parry the flying guardian lasers most every time, it so rarely reflects it back into their eye-shooter-thing, so you almost have to use the ancient arrows to kill them. For everything else, it just disintegrates them immediately, which is no fun. Guardians do leave drops for you ... but Lynels and other normal enemies just go POOF! and leave nothing behind. That's just no fun.
So, to end this ... I just love me some normal arrows, and then shock arrows. The rest have useful features for me, but by and large I just don't use them very much.