The other day I looked at my DEVONthink database I’ve populated over the last 15 years or so, and what do ya know. It has a couple dozen top-level folders, each with a handful of folders inside, and that’s about it. I didn’t deliberately set out to do this, but “Banking/{Bank1|Bank2|Bank3}”, “Medical/{Me,wife,kid}”, “Taxes/{2020,2021,2022}”, and so on evolved that way anyway.
I love the idea of tagging, but turns out nearly all the information I care to store long-term can be filed more easily than it can be tagged. It’s rare that I want to have the same doc in 2 places, mainly limited to when I’m collecting information to send to someone else (e.g. filing taxes, applying for a business loan). When that happens, I just - shocker! - make copies of those docs in a new folder I’ve created to collect everything I need. DEVONthink makes the copy a zero-sized reference to the original doc and gives each copy a special icon so you know it’s a duplicate.
So basically, Johnny Decimal couldn’t possibly work for me, and yet I ended up with a sad version of the exact same thing on my own naturally. Well, huh. Maybe it’s not so silly after all.
(Also, regarding tagging: the idea of a database with a few tens of thousands of files in the same namespace, searchable by tagging, gives me hives. I know people do this all the time, and it’s a “me problem” that it bothers me, but oh, how it bothers me.)