I can sorta agree; a database with tables and folders would be a much more useful basis for an operating system. After all, most programs will read and parse small configuration files. With a database it becomes necessary.
Windows sorta does that with the Registry but A) the registry isn't the filesystem, B) the registry is a filesystem on top of NTFS and C) the registry sucks.
If the Registry had the power of,say, PostgreSQL to back it up, it would suck a lot less. Of course, for large files, you should still be able to rely on more conventional filesystems as well as for backwards compat.
It has no schema. Imagine if it had some sort of schema, declaring what sub-keys and values are allowed under each key. Imagine if the schema was self-documenting, with each key/value declaration in the schema had an associated description explaining what it was for.
Imagine if it had richer data types. For example, a "link" type, in which a value actually has the name of another key. If you try to delete the target, either it doesn't let you, or it sets the value to some sort of null value. (Basically, something like foreign keys in a relational database.) And an index to quickly find "back-references" (show me everything that points to this key.)
The registry should have included a database of installed packages/applications, and every key should have been marked with what package/application owns it, along with some sort of indexing to make it quick to find everything a package/application owns. Application uninstalls would have been a lot cleaner, and issues with apps leaving behind junk in the registry avoided.
Transactions: This was added in Windows Vista. But it could have been there from the beginning.
OTOH, remembering the registry was originally implemented in Windows 3.1, which had minimum system requirements of a 286 with 1MB of memory, maybe my suggestions above just wouldn't have been feasible.
I think it could, it just required a little more imagination.
NewtonOS was released in 1993 so around the same timeframe, lower memory requirements than 1mb and could do this stuff:
I always wonder where things would have gone if they had kept developing NewtonOS. It had so many interesting concepts that may have worked really well with a little more computing power.
Windows sorta does that with the Registry but A) the registry isn't the filesystem, B) the registry is a filesystem on top of NTFS and C) the registry sucks.
If the Registry had the power of,say, PostgreSQL to back it up, it would suck a lot less. Of course, for large files, you should still be able to rely on more conventional filesystems as well as for backwards compat.