I'm confused. Is it the concept that's awful, or the implimentation? Is the
problem that visibiliby of the attributes to tools is inconsistant and
they're managed with entirely different symantics? Or is the whole idea of
arbitrary file attributes a tool of the devil?

Certainly, some file formats (I'm thinking of MP3) use file attributes to
great effect, though of course they're specially implemented in the context
of the files' use case. Is it appropriate to implement a general file
tagging capability that is file independant and managed by the OS?