No - it was marketing. The older Filesystem was a full on database and would allow the user to do all kinds of weird and wonderful things with metadata. But the Filesystem interface in BeOS prior to PR1 (well, technically AA) made it almost a herculean feat to interface an external non native file system to the OS.

BFS was written in a way that complied to a file system API that could then support other non-BFS file systems being plugged in. But because it was written in more of a traditional file system way, the database features got massively cut down to just attributes and indexes with live queries. It was a trade off. The database hype built by the DR releases (mainly for BeBox, I think only one made it publicly to Mac) was maintained because the attributes sort of mimicked the bare minimum functionality needed to tick a marketing box. But BFS really doesn't do much more than some other file systems have since done.

The OFS was more like the SQLServer based WinFS that Longhorn was going to have.