Lightroom does an excellent job of managing your files through a normal SQL database, but like any other app-centric view the abstraction breaks down at some point because users still have access to the files on disk. When you want to make edits using external tools you always get a feeling that you are swimming upstream.

What is needed is an OS level abstraction that still lets you access your data in files, but hides the actual physical organization of these files. The application interface to the file system shouldn't be a tree but a database/query like interface. Microsoft had great plans for this (already in Vista http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS), but had to pull the plug on it. It hasn't reappeared in Win7 or 8. In a system like WinFS applications like Lightroom awould not have to manage its own SQLite database tables of your photos and their physical location. The query would go directly to the operating systems file database.

I am not sure about Lightroom, but their entire Adobe File Manager thing was garbage and clogged a lot of computers I used to maintain.

I am not sure Lightroom can be any better. The problem is this issue, as he described it, not you, is the abstraction problem moves up. Instead of remembering which file is where, you need to remember which app opens which type of files, which sucks if you have four or five apps that do the same thing (pretty common for me and any audio/video manager on Android device, and browsers to boot, as eash open has different capabilities for certain file types).

And I (and I'm sure others) had an absolute nightmare when my the iPhoto library on my mother's machine became corrupted.

Lightroom suggests to backup the catalog once a week. Backups in general should be done by people who value their data, regardless of computer literacy (I know, there are still problems with that). In any case, the only thing you'd lose if Lightroom would corrupt its database would be the edits you did to the images (yes, I'd love to have those in a file next to the photos too, which would allow for far easier backups, especially if photos move around without LR knowing).