Shopify theme development built around how you actually merchandise

Most theme problems trace back to the same root cause: a template built for last year's merchandising plan, sections only the developer who wrote them fully understands, and a marketing team waiting on a ticket queue to swap a homepage banner. Online Store 2.0 solved a lot of this in theory — JSON templates, reusable sections, app blocks that drop in without touching Liquid — but plenty of stores are still running themes that never adopted the pattern properly, or adopted half of it and left the rest as a tangle of hardcoded markup.

Metafields and metaobjects make the gap worse when they're missing. A product page that can't show a size chart, an ingredient list, or a fit guide without a developer hardcoding it into the template is a page that costs money every time the catalogue changes shape.