(this took me a long time to reply... :S) yeah, hazel looks a lot more powerful than all the reviews I had read make it out to be. They all seem to focus on automatically sorting files which is something I'm definitely not interested in.

I guess using hazel alone still misses an important aspect of what I would like, but I didn't explicitly mention it. That is getting the metadata back out of the files. Spotlight comments are all well and good, especially if you want them for searching but they're kind of one-way.

In that I mean there's no real way to browse files along with the spotlight comments. And the usual one-line table views aren't very usable if they do allow you to add a comments column like Finder does (and unfortunately pathfinder doesn't)

If I'm putting descriptive data into the metadata i'd like to be able to browse the files with the comments viewable alongside the files.

It was the recent lifehacker post about hazel that reminded me of this conversation, i'll definately go check out hazel again regardless