@transmitthis - calibre has baked into it a number of fundamentals, that make sense for books but have to be forced into other usage for anything else. Like every entry requiring an "Author" and a Title". Like ISBN being key to metadata is retrieved (or empty books created from excel input like theDucks just confirmed for you). Like using a file system with a specific directory path, and limitations on what goes where. Like zip and rar files being handled in a specific way. How things get displayed. What things are "core data" and what things are not. Like concepts of Libraries, conversions, formats, devices etc.
Now if people choose to shoehorn non-books into calibre and are happy with the limitations that they face, sure, good luck to them. Audiobooks is an example where there from memory there is even a plugin to help (though ABs are obviously closer to the book metaphor than other ideas). However you started suggesting in your post that calibre should have changes to encourage people to start using it for storing video files, photos, mp3 files and any other stuff people come up with.
With its current database and UI design it could not do any of those jobs remotely well in comparison to dedicated applications - just like MediaMonkey would be a rubbish book mgmt application, and Adobe Lightroom a crappy recipe application. It may be nearly "good enough" for your own purposes, but asking the developers to support your list would introduce complexity to the codebase and UI and dilute progress on calibre's key features of managing books which is why millions of people downloaded the app in the first place.
Right now, all decisions around new features, database design, UI and performance tuning can be made based around the fact that calibre "only" has to represent a book metaphor. As soon as you start to introduce other variables into that, the amount of complexity and bloat it introduces would slow the development to a crawl. Kovid already has a todo list a mile long of supporting book mgmt - why would those of us who chose calibre as an ebook mgmt application want that sacrificed?
This has all been discussed before if you do a search through the threads, so it isn't just my opinions
. I just attempted to head off at the pass another discussion on it.
