There's a note-management system that can be built that's much better than all existing systems, I am certain of it, but all my attempts to design it so far have failed.
It somehow involves a combination of organically determining a hierarchy of the notes, and then helping to algorithmically prune notes that are no longer useful.
Yes, totally! I feel like this Zettelkasten technique is a step in the right direction with the idea of linking notes, but relying on these long, random looking strings to do the linking seems wrong. Human-readable tags that serve as links seem better, but I suppose that's more of just a software issue, not a technique issue. My ideal note-taking software for what you're describing would be:
1. platform independent (or at least very easy to use on multiple platforms, phone + desktop)
2. your "organically determined hierarchy of notes" idea ... a clustering map of some sort.
3. links via human-readable tags
4. FOSS
I'm guessing this exists already but that I just need to look harder.
It somehow involves a combination of organically determining a hierarchy of the notes, and then helping to algorithmically prune notes that are no longer useful.