I think that a major obstacle to the proper use of calibre by lauraq is the crash she is experiencing when she tries to load all of her ebooks - since she's unable to take full advantage of calibre metadata and appreciate many functionalities of calibre itself or its plugins, it is natural to turn to alternative ways to organize her files. But it should not be necessary at all, and for the vast majority of users it is not.
Since this crash is certainly not part of the normal user experience
perhaps we could help with this basic technical problem? How many ebooks are we talking about, precisely? On what computer with how much memory? Are there error messages that would help to identify the cause of the crash?