Nice to see folks rethinking files, as they're a scourge on the planet and an antiquated anti-pattern that has been holding back the industry pretty much since its inception. I don't know how anyone could take a look at /etc for example, and consider it anything but archaic. The adduser command is some 1130 lines long, and all it does is do CRUD on files, to name just one example. Then there are countless config files that just have to be edited by hand and happily accept syntax errors and logical errors. No modern system would tolerate this.

The root of the problem with files is that they lack an information model, beyond just a sequence of bytes. They are unopinionated to a fault. All files have structure. Even if that structure is a "non-structure" like "all these files are just a random sequence of meaningless bytes", then that is their structure. But this information isn't present in the system, nor can it be enforced or constrained when that is desirable.

To me, the obvious alternative is the database, aka "everything is a row". We have used the database (relational or otherwise, but mostly relation) to successfully model many many domains, and bring coherence and clarity to them. The cool thing about the relational database is that it's based on an underlying relational algebra. The syntax of data in an RDBMS is really just one manifestation of a deeper layer of structure that is syntax-free, and these abstract structures can be (and are) manifested in multiple coexisting syntaxes.

I'm exploring this pattern ("datafication", headshake) with Aquameta (http://aquameta.org/) and written a lot more about why file-centric is holding us back (http://blog.aquameta.com/intro-chpater2-filesystem/). Boot to PostgreSQL! :)