I'm confused. Is it the concept that's awful, or the implimentation? Is the problem that visibiliby of the attributes to tools is inconsistant and they're managed with entirely different symantics? Or is the whole idea of arbitrary file attributes a tool of the devil?
Certainly, some file formats (I'm thinking of MP3) use file attributes to great effect, though of course they're specially implemented in the context of the files' use case. Is it appropriate to implement a general file tagging capability that is file independant and managed by the OS?
