You can't generalize personal information organization habits. The "everything is miscellaneous" model of information organization does not work for everyone under every context. For example, I have a very precise hierarchical classification for work-critical documents. In some instances, even spatial arrangement in a directory has significance.

Some pay the time-cost of information organization up front so that the cost of retrieval is O(1). Some people take the opposite choice - put information in miscellaneous pile and execute a full query every time, so pay nothing for organization and a bit every time for retrieval.

The point of a file browser is to provide an interface for those kind of people who value classification. The point of Spotlight is to provide an interface for people who otherwise would have dumped all their files in a directory or two (or dear god, directly onto the Desktop).

I'm actually like you in that regard. When I'm archiving data for the first time I pay great attention to where it goes and how it is stored, and I even customize the views of individual folders.

But 99% of the time later on when I use that data, I don't actually navigate the file system to get to it. I use spotlight.