I feel like you are trying too hard to make everything look uniform in the filesystem, at the expense of performance, expressivity, and whatnot. The whole point

I feel like you are trying too hard to make everything look uniform in the filesystem, at the expense of performance, expressivity, and whatnot. The whole point of having programs and applications is that they can do their stuff with arbitrary programmatic behaviors. I think the main hindrance to making all data "accessible" is the abundance of proprietary and/or underdocumented software. It would also be nice to have a pluggable file type parser/converter, which is what I assume @pyinstallwoes's sibling comment more or less describes.