I have a lot of friends who do literally all of their work out of their "Downloads" folder - I don't know how they survive that way, but they love music players which they can just point at a directory and say "index this and make a neat library" and know that everything lives in one place.

Personally, I'm in the camp who kept a manually-organized directory tree for music for years, and would still prefer that mode of working, but even among my technical friends I think I'm in the minority there. Presumably Apple was right that this is what most people prefer.