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It seems to me most of this stuff can be done via unix command line if you are so adept... without this app.

You can have some poor's man tag management with subdir-per-tag containing softlinks, but it gets unwieldly pretty quick.

It's not terribly portable, but you can use extended file attributes.

Here's an article showing how they work for Linux, OSX, and FreeBSD: http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/pages/extattrs.html

What existing tools can automatically generate a virtual filesystem based on tag metadata?

no not virtual filesystem, i meant querying your files by date or tag... find, grep and something to print the tag would do the job.

But where is the metadata? With OP's tool, it is in some db, so you don't have to tamper with your files or their name.

well with mp3 files the meta data is in the file, it's called an id3 tag. for other files, depends on the file.

Tagging can be done with symlinks if you just want to stick to using the filesystem.