Why do you care about open buffers? When I first started using emacs I cared because other text editors force you to care by displaying "tabs" or the like for each open buffer. But emacs is better than that. The only time I ever see all open buffers is if I do M-x list-buffers, and I never do that. Other than that, open buffers never get in the way. I do use midnight-mode to kill all "old" buffers in the middle of the night to stop the memory usage growing indefinitely, though.