@Mikkel Høgh: Understand my purpose here. It is not to bash anyone's hard work in developing the Taxonomy module, but to challenge what I see as the overuse of a module and encourage developers and site builders to think outside the box when building a Drupal 7 site. I apologize if some of my hyperbole in the post has offended you directly. It was meant to promote a discussion not offend. As you stated and I've mentioned a number of times in the post and comments, there are clearly some usecases for the module.

The science of taxonomy is not in question here but only the implementation of said science in Drupal. :-)

To All: The exercise of writing this post, reading and responding to the comments so far has taught me a lot about taxonomy and related modules. While I consider myself an experienced Drupal developer I do not know all. Discussions like this help me become a better developer and I hope they also educate others. And as always I reserve the right to change my mind as I learn and Drupal improves.