One solution I am personally working on is folders that just "register" or filter certain types of objects, so that you can have a folder (or tab) that shows all your SQL methods for example, though they actually are all in your root folder.
What about having a folder which somehow 'registers' or concatenates the namespace of the enclosing folder with it's contents, perhaps only updating at certain times? Or... 'appearing' to it's enclosing folder not as one object but a list of stuff, everything inside it? I'll shut up now, since I'm not looking at the source :)
You seem to think the other way around, but maybe that way the problem could be solved more easily. So we would have a parent folder that treats the contents of some of its children as if they were his own. This must be easy to do. The question is: Can we hide that in the management interface? Again, just overloading the main.dtml method with a version that uses, let's say an "myReallyOwnObjectValues()" instead of "objectValues()" should be straightforward. Just dreaming a bit ... Joachim