We had the same problem, and weren't happy with next-routes as a solution. Ultimately we ended up making our own library to handle routing. It's pretty low-level (some stuff is left for implementation in user-land), but so far it's been solid:

https://github.com/Zegocover/next-route-resolver

There is a bug right now related to query strings being hidden from the visible URL (they're still there as far as Next is concerned), but we'll be fixing that pretty soon.