I definitely get what you are saying about having the pre built out API but the Admin API for Shopify is very well documented and very straightforward as far as the calls being made. The wrapper API doesn’t seem to give me much advantage overall. As I go and need to make calls I am going to be building on this PDP bare-bones app to have a similar built in API structure of reusable functions but I also gain a lot out of doing this by hand in way of learning. Now the choice of PHP is for a whole different discussion. I would argue (as an active professional web developer) though that PHP is actually by no means a dying language. The new versions of PHP have fixed a lot of old performance concerns and between just WordPress and Magento alone, there are thousands upon thousands of sites written in PHP that will likely never be rewritten to another language. That being said, I am familiar with Node and may give that a shot at some point.