You need to step beyond yourself. It's complicated to you (and me, and probably literally every single reader of HN) because we understand that it's an indirec

You need to step beyond yourself. It's complicated to you (and me, and probably literally every single reader of HN) because we understand that it's an indirection and the reality is hidden. We are accustomed to that reality and virtual folders without a "physical" root are, to us, an obfuscation. But step into the shoes of someone who doesn't understand what a file even is. Someone that would be more at home on a tablet, without a filesystem at all. Home folder? What's that? For that user, just having a Documents folder is great. They don't need to know, nor do they care, where it is. You've apparently never had to support someone whose desktop is clogged with all their files. They know a file by its location on the desktop, not by its name. If it moves for whatever reason, they are screwed. It is for these people, who are surely now the majority of users, that removing the link from "Documents" to some actual location in the filesystem, is a win. To those of us who know better, it took all of 5s to figure it out the first time you encountered it.