[swa14]

I think I see your point, and it has merit ... but ... :)

in a way, the 'find' program is like what you envision, except it's just for files. That means that someone somewhere along the road, had the same idea/problem (but limited to files) as you and whipped up a parser to produce that meta-data. That particular parser proved to be so useful to so many people, it became it's own program.

There's more than 40 years of sofware-"evolution" contained in unix, and apparently retrieving structured on the command-line has only proven universally useful for files. Unix has outlived many at the time more modern operating systems, and I think it's partly because it lacked a "grand unifying vision". Instead it has a "small, quick&dirty unifying vision" of which "flat text processing" on the commandline is a central part. It has turned out to be the greatest common denominator for being able to write programs, that might be quick and dirty oneliners, but ultimately they got the job done. And only those tiny little utilities that proved to be universally useful were developed into bigger more stuctured programs.

I'm not saying you idea is without merit, but it does apply the principle of "this concept A is useful for this particular problem-set. Let's apply it natively to all problem-sets so it can be useful there too!" ( in a way like Java did with the OO concept).

When simpler visions and concepts are actually implemented in the end it usually turns out one has been replacing witchcraft with voodoo.