"It's manual work that the computer should partially be doing for us."
I disagree, partially ^^ Tags, or where something is located; both can be part of the content.
The cool thing about folders is, if you don't want them, simply don't create them... but don't take it away from those who do themselves more good than harm with it, please :/
While true, the rate at which things are abused appears to be highly correlated to how convenient or user-friendly they are, or how well they solve the problem they are supposed to be solving.
Just looking at how many people have desktops crowded with every document they ever opened, or how many computer-illiterate friends and relatives have asked me how they should backup or transfer their files to and from other computers, because they don't even know you can actually get to them by other means than the 'open file' dialog in their Word Processor, signals to me that many people don't really think organizing files using folders is something they need or want.
I'd agree with the later but I don't see it as a reason to get rid of file structures for those of us that do use them.
Make the open dialog default to where the app last saved, make that in turn default to the home directory or whatever -- make it only display relevant file types -- done. That stuff is littered on the desktop is because dialogs defaulted to it.
And when someone wants to "backup all my files", they'll need a single-click option with a wizard either way, wether their filesystem has folders or not.
That said, I won't lie, while I have intricate folder structures, I also have a lot of "not yet sorted"-type ones. But doing away with folders would just extend that chaos across ALL my files, and also, with some stuff, there is just no replacement for them. for example, audio samples. sorting them by tags or date or anything a machine-readable just doesn't work. Get a good structure, be diligent about where you place stuff, and something like "find a good maracas sample and a flute" is no problem, with a few clicks I'm where I want to be.
Yes, metadata and databases are great, I'm all for them, but with folders you can basically apply metadata to stuff that otherwise cannot hold it. And when that database/metadata stuff gets ready to be usable for more than trivial things, why should it not be able to handle folder structures, which you can create and look at if you want, but don't have to? And if you have a filesystem where there is no hierarchy at all, why not add the possibility to nest it with metadata ("parent_id" ^^) -- ? People who don't need that, notice or need to know none of this stuff.
The cool thing about tags is that you could have multiple ways of viewing them, including a hierarchical folder-like view.
I don't have anything against folders, I just think that tagging is more or less a super set of what folders can do.
You are equalling emails with files, which is not within the point of the OP.
Files are things you store for reuse. Emails are mostly things you should throw right away after reading them. Some emails should become files because they are important. That's why in "normal companies" most people work with attachments, which is a gigantic PITA, but fit with the "Files are important things I need to store for reuse" model.
Gmail made a move away from folders and it's one that I've embraced.
1. It's easy to spend too long manually organizing things into folders. It's the kind of relaxing, busy-work we can fall into to avoid the hard stuff we're supposed to be doing.
2. There are many arbitrary ways to rearrange hierarchies and no clear limit for how deep they should be. Many of us with slight OCD-ish tendencies can fall down the rabbit-hole here.
3. It's manual work that the computer should partially be doing for us.
There are ways to mitigate these problems. Multiple views of the same structure, tags instead of folders and easily accessibly, instantaneous search can teach us to be less dogmatic about our directories.
I very rarely need to use tags/folders with my email now. Search works for me 90% of the time. It's only special tasks such as doing my tax returns or tracking a particularly complex bunch of emails where I might use tags. I think my file system is probably an order of magnitude more complicated and there is less automatic metadata with files (my file system doesn't know what project a file is related unless I tell it whereas you can tell a lot about an email just using from/to/cc fields.)
At this point I was hoping to end on some kind of conclusion but I can't think of one.