I'm actually with the author that if it were going to be rewritten a freshly written columnar database would be way more efficient than representing it as a filesystem but that either would be better than what we have after 30 years. I just don't think "it wasn't a filesystem originally" has much to do with why it's so crap now. Similar case: posix specifies network sockets be accessed as files/filesystems (as most everything in posix is) but nobody actually used that representation because it's inefficient even though it's the standard and easily mappable to files/filesystems. Well I think Solaris actually allows both but the point stands.