I'm not really agreeing with you here to be honest. Between using File Sets, searches and advanced filtering, I normally don't have any problem finding anything, but I really like that I can do bulk actions on files, upload multiple in one go, etc.

The underlying folder structure of where the files are actually stored is sort of irrelevant. Remember that files are versioned as well, so the File Manager is sort of a layer on top of the actual filesystem. It's abstracted away, so you really don't need to dig through the actual folders.

A real 'power' feature I like is the ability to enter in a URL to pull a file in from another server - very handy when you are replacing an existing site.

The only thing I don't like about the way files are managed in concrete5 is that older version of files, when deleted don't actually get deleted, just marked as deleted. I've read that this is more of an issue with linking and older page versions (I think), but it does add bloat to a site if you replace files a lot. (I often just delete a file and upload the new version to avoid this).

I believe in 5.7 the file manager now handles dragging and dropping files into the browser to upload.

Is there some particular aspect of the File Manager you don't like? Are you using File Sets to manage your files?

The file manager itself was designed to manage your files, not provide a simple directory structure where one could simply browse to their files on disk, locate it, and remove it (although with some effort you could programatically do that). There are probably a couple reasons for doing this, one of which being some intentional security by obscurity so that if you want to apply file permissions to your files someone can't just sequentially go and download all your files anyway via url (which could be done now if you guessed the folder structure but as you've indicated, that's not the easiest thing to do). Another thing that this directory tree does is help to avoid hitting file limits per directory on large sites. In several operating systems after you have so many files in a single directory, file access and list times start to take a long time, and could cause a noticeable performance impact on your site. So this helps in the sense of scalability as well (even if it wasn't intentional).

The idea behind the File manager is to provide an abstraction layer between the end user, and the files. In 5.7 there has been some work done to enhance this, allowing for the potential use of cloud storage or other storage adapters to be built and utilized which may allow for performance boosts and local disk space saving.

If you have any specific requests for 5.7, the best place to put them is on github, since that's where all the development is happening and it will force your suggestion to be looked at by someone from the core team (even if in the end they end up closing it at least it will be recorded there).https://github.com/concrete5/concrete5-5.7.0/issues...

Hope that helps. - Joe