Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

I broadly agree. Filesystems should be databases, and it should be possible to create projections of the filesystem based on any metadata associated with files. Files should also be strongly typed. Ultimately, a "directory" is just a piece of meta data associated with a file.

However, I rather suspect that the Gnome Zeitgeist, by just adding "by date" projections is going to demonstrate that that's really not good enough.