The quibble isn't with the hierarchies. It's with the navigation. The point is that some do not enjoy navigating anything, hierarchical or not. That's why librarians' assistants have jobs.

So if you have a magical medium where information can be abstracted behind any means of retrieval, you give the apes what they want: their bananas in a pile, instead of in tiny, head-scratch-inducing drawers.

The vast majority of computer users (outside of knowledge workers, and techies) are completely befuddled by hierarchial navigation. Eliminating it was one of the great steps forward on the iPhone.

If someone is able to purchase food at a supermarket does it follow that this same individual cannot also have difficulty understanding a hierarchical filesystem?

> People can navigate a web page.

Not very well, which is why so much time is spent trying to avoid increasing navigation depth and reducing the amount of views to minimum.

> They can find a food item in a menu or in the supermarket.

First time I see a menu that's comparable to a filesystem tree I'm going to burst out in laughter and think it's a gimmick. A supermarket is closer to an art statement about inherent chaos of modern lives than to anything hierarchical.

Yes, there are hierarchical systems, the big one being a common management structure (which works eh), and administrative subdivision of countries (hint: people almost never actually traverse that tree, they always go directly for a specific entity in it. Also, they routinely get lost in it). They're a bother and used when they can't be avoided, or when nobody bothered to work on something better. Or when you need to sort a bunch of numbers or something. The reason for avoidance being, besides the low transparency, complex data maps into trees really poorly.

Hierarchical navigation is useful/necessary when a physical item can only be in one clearly-defined location.

That's not the case for computer documents.

>People can navigate a web page.

Barely. Perhaps you never read the complaints people have about webpage navigation, or noticed that almost no user understands hierarchical URLs.

You know what the top Google searches are? Stuff like "fb", "facebook", "twitter" etc. Because people cannot even understand they can write the URL on the address bar or remember it.

>They can find a food item in a menu or in the supermarket.

You kidding me? People can barely find stuff in the supermarket, and only after searching and scanning with their eyes the shelves. For items they haven't bought in a while, they have to check the sings over every isle, or ask a supermarket employee.

Really bad example.