Given the implementations I've seen of file metadata outside of the extension I'm okay with this - every time OSes (especially windows) tries to strip away the extension it ends up switching the file type from being a description of "what am I" to "what can open me", I really dislike "what can open me" especially when we get into a lot of common office work file formats. Knowing the difference between .rtf, .txt, .doc and .docx is important because of the special attributes of those files - additionally I frequently run into issues with character encoding and that should be an even easier problem to solve so... my outlook is not very optimistic.
Agreed. Apple's pre-OSX metadata system was two pieces: "What am I" and "Who created me." This was an amazingly flexible system that just worked and was the best of both worlds.
That's fine, not every task that is possible must be directly supported by the OS - third party apps to fiddle with data that is considered non-primary workflow like that is OK.
