I'm trying to imagine how it can actually take up time. There are so many tools for getting media, watching media, and organizing media that it is basically all automated away at this point. The Media Hoarder metadata thread this week rightfully gave the author crap because he refused to say whether his tool worked with the common organization ways or required you to ruin the organization of your library just to get a few stats.
The only tool I can think of where I feel like I'm wasting time is Calibre. The EBook community really dropped the ball by letting one weird guy and his quirks determine the entire organization of the ecosystem because he wrote a really good conversion tool. Luckily books take up so little space it's fine to copy them into Calibre and duplicate them back to a different organization method.
> I'm trying to imagine how it can actually take up time. There are so many tools for getting media, watching media, and organizing media that it is basically all automated away at this point.
Thinking that various tools existing means no time or attention is paid to organization anymore seems like a very optimistic view towards those tools. To your point with the Media Hoarder thread, relying solely on a single tool to organize your stuff isn't a common practice, anyway.
I have a NAS with 42TB of capacity at the moment. I'm running about ten web services to present or organize certain types of media. It still takes time to add new media to the appropriate service, and there's still a ton of data that doesn't fit into any of those services and must be organized manually on the filesystem (if it's organized at all).
When I think of "data hoarding," I'm not just talking about scraping torrents for commonly available TV shows into your Plex instance. I'm thinking of any possible data on the internet-- that includes one-off videos from not only YouTube but lots of smaller websites (Vimeo, Dailymotion, Yahoo! Screen, etc), software of various types (OSes, games, miscellaneous apps), images that may or may not be grouped together and may or may not include textual accompaniment, documents that might be in one of half a dozen different formats, etc. And then of course, you also have original content that you create in the course of living, whether that's photo albums from your phone, receipts you scan, or whatever else, which you probably don't want mixed in with other peoples' stuff that you downloaded.
The only tool I can think of where I feel like I'm wasting time is Calibre. The EBook community really dropped the ball by letting one weird guy and his quirks determine the entire organization of the ecosystem because he wrote a really good conversion tool. Luckily books take up so little space it's fine to copy them into Calibre and duplicate them back to a different organization method.