I am fairly familiar with the technical underpinnings, and the whole reasoning behind having fieldable entities in Drupal core is precisely that we no longer have to make nodes of everything we want to add fields to.

You might not know of, or appeciate them, but there are a great many good usecases for a good taxonomy system (it is, after all, its own branch of science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy )

So if you don't like Taxonomy, you're free to do something else, but please stop bashing what you don't understand.