Great post!
It took us some time, but since you’ve been calling us out directly, here are [our official Contentful thoughts on trees][1]. Long story short: We actually do like (and support) trees as one form of creating structure. True, not in your drag and drop type of web CMS visual UI, but conceptually for sure. However, we also think of trees as just one specific organizing principle with certain use cases (e.g. your collection of evergreen pages type of website). Other other scenarios may call for very different structures (think recipe app). [1]: https://www.contentful.com/blog/2015/02/17/content-trees-tags-and-facets-in-contentful/