I've gone to a very document-heavy workflow over the last few years. I still program but a lot of what I do is about collecting and curating documents and data on people and organizations and then synthesizing that information in various ways, sorta like business intelligence. So I have maybe 20-30k documents/media and maybe ~100 top- and second-level folders that I access regularly.

Luckily I have the kind of memory to put things somewhere and then know where to look a year or more later, but in the last year or two I've noticed that I'm using the quick access (ie your 20 or 30 most recent files) in a very similar matter to a stack in assembler. Also a lot of my busiest folders are sorted by date rather than filename because I depend heavily on the contextual memory when I learned things.