I'm also a huge fan of the spatial Finder concept, but memory has a way of rendering the past in better lighting.

System 7 (or 8, 9 for that matter), didn't have copy & paste. You could copy file names into SimpleText, for example, but you couldn't use it to manage files. Also, clicking anywhere outside a window would deselect every file you had carefully chosen, so dragging and dropping was a Zen exercise.

And there were invisible files, plenty actually. Like, the desktop for instance? An invisible folder. Or every single custom icon? An invisible "Icon\r" resource fork file. We inherited the invisible attribute in HFS+ from those days.

We did have a much simpler file system structure, and I miss that as well. I welcomed the column view, but the spatial Finder is indeed missed, though it still lives in a sense in iOS's springboard.