Actually, polarized glasses are the better, at least in theory.
There's no flickering at all, whereas with shutters half the time you see darkness (1/2 with one eye, 1/2 with the other). They're passive, so they don't have to be synchronized with the TV, they don't require batteries, they're less prone to failure, they're easier, they're cheaper (one pair of active shutter glasses costs a hundred pounds for a Pana 3D plasma TV).
There's also no "crosstalk", which is when the TV isn't quick enough to completely fade one eye's view before switching to the other and thus some of the previous image bleeds into the next, creating a ghosting effect. Circularly polarized glasses are completely free of this artifact.
In practice however, there are many problems.
As your eyes need to see both images at the same time, TVs have to double their resolution to 1920*2160. It's already a problem to maintain even 1080p in motion for most LCD TVs and many mide level plasmas, so it's going to take a while in itself and the tech isn't going to be cheap.
Adding a polarizing filter to the screen is very expensive too, and there are very few - if any - TVs on the market that have such a feature.
The only affordable way right now to use polarized glasses is with a projector and a silver screen, and even that is far from a relatively cheap 3D LCD TV.
On the other hand adding shutter glass support is relatively cheap and easy, as the manufacturer only has to increase the refresh speed of the screen to 120Hz. There's a rather high initial price tag for now, and there's the added cost of requiring a very high quality panel in general to minimize the above mentioned crosstalk; but it's still just an evolutionary step from existing technology, instead of completely re-inventing half the display to support polarization.
) I know, then they expect their TV to last at the minimum 5-10 years. Combine that with the fact that 3D TVs might be going through rapid and frequent changes over the next few years...and people like me have no problem waiting.