What is the best way to have an entry for top-level categories? I'm currently working on an eCommerce project with categories for products:

- Category 1
    - Sub-category 1
    - Sub-category 2
    - Sub-category 3
- Category 2
    - Sub-category 1
    - Sub-category 2
    - Sub-category 3


What I am hoping to achieve, is to give each top-level category its own entry in Craft, so I can apply my site-wide SEO, matrix content and utility fields.

I am aware you can apply fields to categories, but the whole double-clicking on a category and managing the content from the small modal window approach isn't ideal, especially with category pages that are a bit heavy on the content side.

These categories do have their own URL, and creating an entry with the same slug results in incrementation: example-category-1, which is to be expected.

Is there any way in Craft I can get round this? I guess if there is no other way I can apply fields to the category, but I wanted to see if anyone had any other ideas.
After a little more consideration, I decided it was best instead not to use categories for this.

I have instead created a 'Product Categories' structure, and the relationships are handled through an entry field.