A filesystem engineer/professor at a top-tier university told me once (well he told a whole class of us) that hierarchy is the only mechanism that the human br

A filesystem engineer/professor at a top-tier university told me once (well he told a whole class of us) that hierarchy is the only mechanism that the human brain has for dealing with complexity. A few people balked, they don't like 'trees' or what have you but nobody could come up with an alternative. This was nearly 20 years ago and I still haven't heard of a better idea. So what's a filesystem? It's a very good and very scalable data structure for storing lot's of items. It's pretty good at lot's of little things and big things a like and a bunch of sizes in between. This problem remains. Then be it tags, folders, something else, it's all just hierarchy to find and store your stuff in that data structure.. Where it looks like everything is going is having multiple overlay hierarchies, all your songs are in the music folder but then you tag different things to help you sort it out. Then maybe the computer can figure out some more optimal ways to store stuff. Take those fancy hybrid drives, maybe songs you don't play too often, there is no reason they can't be in part of the filesystem that is on spinning media and not in flash.