I very much like the idea of the hierarchy and the content just being the file system.
I’m less excited about the connection to Zettelkasten because that smells of fad.
If there were an app that would make useful sense out of a few tens of gigabytes of stuff kept in a plain folder hierarchy, I’d be a potential customer. In a way Dropbox tries to do this, and it’s better than nothing (for me) but I still wish for some kind of magical portal into my messy attic.
I started working on the app way before Zettelkasten became a thing. My goal is to not force a specific workflow. If you would like to use it as Zettelkasten, it'll work. If you prefer a different system, you can have the app adapt to your needs. It's all just files & folders underneath, only the representation varies.
I'm curious about your folder hierarchy. What kind of files do you keep there to get to tens of gigabytes and what type of knowledge would you like to extract/what type of connections to form?
I'm currently at about 100 MB for roughly 1,400 individual notes (text and images).
Text, images, videos up to and including the occasional rare film, lots of PDFs (usually small), sometimes a PowerPoint or an Excel spreadsheet, used to also do source code and builds and stuff before GitHub... and if I had faith in them being more useful, as opposed to just backed up, I'd probably dump a whole bunch more in my semi-organized DropBox folder.
So for my use-case the Organizer App would have to be able to deal with lots and lots of data of various types, occasionally including multi-gig files like the rough cut of a film, and also know when I "mv this ~/Organizer/that/" -- a tall order, I know. But with storage so cheap these days, I still dream of that.
Re: semi-organized DropBox folder: this came up here recently and might be of help to organize your files: https://johnnydecimal.com
The app I'm working is more focused on capturing knowledge as structured notes. It sounds like a good full text search could already be of help in your case. That maybe combined with slowly categorizing your content with a system like Johhny.Decimal or something similar.
The idea is that the app "understands" the structure of the content. A bit like a combination of a notebook, Xcode, a calendar, and Wolfram Alpha :)
Bi-directional links and timestamps are working already so implementing a "Zettelkasten" should be possible with the current version.
If you're interested, there's a signup for the beta here:
http://kitestack.com/lnotes/