So I just started playing, and am looking for clarifaction on shields. Do shields regenerate? Lore wise, they should, and the rules state

Shields allow a ship to suffer damage without the risk of
being dealt faceup Damage cards. The blue number on a
Ship card is the ship’s shield value, indicating how many
shield tokens to place on the Ship card during setup.

A ship cannot have more shield tokens than its
shield value. If a ship has a number of shield tokens
equal to its shield value, it cannot recover shields.

Which also implies they do recover. But is that just a special ability that allows them to do that, or is it all shields in general?

Only specific rules allow shield tokens to be recovered. R2-D2 astromech upgrade for example.

I thought the same as you initially and couldn't see the point of shields+hull if shields didn't regenerate. Now that I've seen unshielded ships suffer critical damage from the first attack I get it.

Yep, shields only regenerate if a card specifically says that they do. There aren't many ways...

R2D2, R5P9 (Astromechs)

Reinforced Deflectors (Large Ship Only System)

GONK (Scum Only crew)

IG88A (Scum Aggressor pilot)

Miranda Doni (Rebel K Wing pilot)

Chewbacca (Rebel crew)

R2D2 (Rebel crew)

I'm pretty sure that's it.

Maybe they should according to "lore" but for reasons of game balance and likely other things they do not. They have the added benefit of preventing a ship from taking cards as damage which may not seem like much until it prevents you from taking a face-up card that may ruin your day (you don't know as you never actually draw that card) be it drawn that way or flipped up later.

There are a couple ways to regain shields but all are limited in how they can be used and generally pretty expensive when compared to the ships they can go on when combined with their opportunity costs of use.

Epic ships have regen mechanics more inline with what you would expect from the lore. I think of it as the dogfight timescale is so short that the fighters dont have time to regenerate shields (outside of specially upgraded ships).