Which stepper driver?

Morning all! I am currently resurrecting a previous project, and incorporating code I have developed and learnt about since last looking at it. I am currently using a v1 adafruit motor shield to drive two steppers. As the af shield uses a shift register to drive the pins I have to use the af motor shield library, and am stuck with their pin choices (basically). 

 

If I use h bridges modules instead, am I correct in thinking I should use less (or the same number of) pins,  give myself the flexibility as to where to wire them to, and also can use the accelstepper library on its own?