I agree and disagree. I’ll keep my comment here brief.
Both JD and to-do lists largely exist to do the exact same thing. Wrangle the infinite into organized domains, and then give the user the freedom to go through life dealing with domains rather than individual tasks. A to-do list organized by deadlines is based on time, organized by willingness-to-engage like Mark Forster suggests is secretly organized by available energy, or organized by next-actionable-task like David Allen is organized by location.
I think a study into the philosophy of how organization of tasks and organization of JD overlap can lead to understanding principles of organization and then refining JD. For that, I hope Johnny doesn’t give up on it. Especially because so much of what we store as files is for the dream of “one day this will be useful to me”. Otherwise we just delete the files.
That said, I agree that Johnny is a person we’re all waiting on more words from re: organizing file-systems so tangents that take up his time are worth pointing out. 