Front-End Interfaces Without Shortcodes

What you’re doing is, in my opinion, the best way to accomplish this. First off, the pages are a good way to go, because they give users the ability to customize parts of the page like title, meta fields, etc. You don’t have to use shortcodes per se, you can filter the_content for these pages, but shortcodes offer additional flexibility. For instance, your users can call them directly in a template file if they don’t want to use pages, or they can use them in other posts if they want to use a custom post type or something. Anyway, nice work, this is a great way to go. That doesn’t solve your issue, but you can probably cross it off your list.