As an SEO Geek I am (at least theoretically) with you. It would be nice to be able to add pages in the root.
However, from a SEO point of view the value is actually very limited and comes from the fact that:
- Short URL’s a generally better - they are easier to share (more shares and links) and less often break up or fail (less broken links)
- Only include relevant words in the URL
So with that in mind the fixed Shopify structure does have a slight negative impact. But it is, important to say, very, very little and you can compensate for this by:
- Making sure the “handle” (the part of the URL you control) is short
- Remove unnecessary stop words - keep only important keywords
The fixed part of the URLs (/pages/, /collections/ etc.) only take up very little space and add limited clutter.
If you follow my advice above and then do everything else you can to optimize your site then I promose you great SEO results on the Shopify platform. All platforms have some limitations or details I - as a SEO Geek would love to be different, but the fact is that for most of the much more important SEO-factors Shopify is actually better than most platforms (such as speed).