The problem with it is that you are assuming that your users are blithering idiots without any actual work to do.
I think we are assuming there will be more sophisticated organizational systems built on top of this abstracted file system eventually. We are still in the very early days of this transition. The need to logically organize files can be accomplished in many different ways. An OS could have logical organization features based on concepts like projects, collections, etc. At that point you can start doing some fancy stuff. What if two projects overlap in some way? No problem. They can both reference the same files. Maybe my project is going to include 100 image files that someone else on my team is producing. No problem. I will just add their shared collection of images into the project and they will auto-update themselves anytime my team member makes changes. In the long run this is all about consolidating sharing, organization and collaboration.
I do everything you describe over the concept of a filesystem. A project/collection... has its own folder. If you have a shared resource you can have it appear in both folders (either through symlinks which are transparent at most UI levels, or by the system automatically configure a mount --bind when you want to share a resource between projects, or you can say, I want to make use of a resource that is part of another project, so I explicitly link to that other project)
> I think we are assuming there will be more sophisticated organizational systems built on top of this abstracted file system eventually.
Yeah, the only problem is it's been 9 years since WinFS was demonstrated as a concept and we're still not significantly closer to mainstream database-like filesystems.
I think we are assuming there will be more sophisticated organizational systems built on top of this abstracted file system eventually. We are still in the very early days of this transition. The need to logically organize files can be accomplished in many different ways. An OS could have logical organization features based on concepts like projects, collections, etc. At that point you can start doing some fancy stuff. What if two projects overlap in some way? No problem. They can both reference the same files. Maybe my project is going to include 100 image files that someone else on my team is producing. No problem. I will just add their shared collection of images into the project and they will auto-update themselves anytime my team member makes changes. In the long run this is all about consolidating sharing, organization and collaboration.