Preach! I've felt this way too, that adding structured data as a universal feature to operating systems would be a pretty agreeable next step.
I wonder if we're past the point of return, though, in terms of technical divergence. It sounds like, in the Ancient Times, there was a handful of great programmers whose work created the world we program in now. But now, there's way more programmers being paid to make slightly different versions of this "next step", and it would require widespread agreement/coordination to implement it on a scale where it's a seamless feature that's taken for granted the way the shell/network/fs are.
I wonder if we're past the point of return, though, in terms of technical divergence. It sounds like, in the Ancient Times, there was a handful of great programmers whose work created the world we program in now. But now, there's way more programmers being paid to make slightly different versions of this "next step", and it would require widespread agreement/coordination to implement it on a scale where it's a seamless feature that's taken for granted the way the shell/network/fs are.