<i>You interact with your music via iTunes; iPhoto manages your photos. They can't trust third party apps to do the same, however, so they have the catch-all Documents directory. In fact, they can't even trust themselves. Apparently the iWork team doesn't talk to the iLife team much; iWork still uses the old school model: browse the filesystem to open a file and pick a folder and a name to save a file</i><p>when you add music to itunes, you keep it around for a long time and it doesn't really move out of itunes.  when you add pictures to iphoto, you import them from your camera and they stick around forever.<p>when you work with word documents and spreadsheets, they don't stick around forever.  they're stored on a network drive at work, or a usb drive, or opened once from an email attachment, and are gone as soon as they came.<p>surely some "favorites" or "bookmarks" can be made to reference documents used commonly (which these applications and file open dialogs already support), but i'm sure the usage patterns of these "work" applications dictate keeping the filesystem hierarchy.  i'd rather apple stick with what is appropriate rather than change it just to unify everything.