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FWIW, I do have a rather eclectic background (amongst other things, I studied art, not CS). One of its benefits is being able to bring a refreshingly unique perspective to the same old set of problems. OTOH, one of its drawbacks is not owning nearly enough brains to put any proposed solutions into practice myself.

On this occasion, I'll let you in on my secret: I've had quite a bit of experience at wrapping my head around multiple mixed paradigms simultaneously. For example, the idea that you can present a 'virtual', idealised tree (or other shaped) representation of data which is bound together by relationships, not containment, is something I've already seen extensively done by the Apple Event Object Model (the elegant but widely misunderstood RPC+query-driven foundation of 'AppleScriptable' applications). And the notion that you can decouple the roles of data identification, data representation, and the physical data storage behind it is taken directly from my time designing and implementing RESTful HTTP interfaces for a distributed application (REST being another very elegant and also widely misunderstood conceptual model for communicating between data management systems at a very high level).

So mostly all I'm really doing here is taking a bunch of ideas I've previously seen conceived and used elsewhere by folks far smarter than me, and synthesising a nice solution to the current predicament out of them. Like I say, it's good to know something of history. (And, hey, on the off-chance somebody here makes their future billions after being inspired by my waffle here, I hope they remember theirs too.;)

So yes, I quite agree they are great ideas... I just can't take personal credit for them is all.