I can strain my imagination and optimistically say that with a suitable UI, the tag-based file browser would be no worse than the hierarchical one — using tags

I can strain my imagination and optimistically say that with a suitable UI, the tag-based file browser would be no worse than the hierarchical one — using tags to categorize your files in a not-too-coarse, not-too-fine way, and maybe even having more flexibility in how you organize and browse your files. Do you ever put information in the file name that could be a tag, or make up meaningless file names when there are few enough files related to a particular page, for example? Or put information in names that could be attached as some sort of comment or notes metadata instead? But I think you bring up some important issues when it comes to organizing your stuff. Would it be better if, instead of having kitchen drawers and cabinets, we had a tag-based system, because, you know, the structure of human knowledge and all that? Why should I be forced to put a utensil in zero or one drawers? Actually, the cabinets and drawers system is nice because you have a sense of “place” — you can think intuitively about where an item is, where an item goes; even if where an item goes is a somewhat arbitrary choice, at least you know exactly what decisions have to be made (which drawer and which compartment in the drawer organizer, for example) to put it away. You can also do a traversal through the cabinets and drawers to see what objects are being stored and how they are being organized, and any time you open a cabinet, you are focusing on a different set of objects. Imagine if you had 10 cabinets and 10 objects in each cabinet, but you actually only have 20 objects total. Every time you open a different cabinet, you see a different 10 of those 20 items. Confusing. I wonder if it would help to have required tags, and exclusive tags. Files with tag X must have tags of type A, B, and C, and may have other nonessential tags. X would be something like, “is a project file for some project,” and A could be the type of project name tags, and so on.