thx @FROGOBLIN, especially for approaching and reacting to the proposition / stimulus on it´s intended grounds and in the spirit(s) it was raised.
– just my reaction:
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I agree to (1), (2), and (3)
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I agree at large.
I agree the discussion of factual user base (esp. if unknown), future speculative directions etc. might lead astray. so in a way it might be better to boil it down to
a) the centrality of my personal uses of audio/video (e.g. I now use to mark loads of documentaries besides screening a lot of podcasts because they simply are troves of research; research often not to be found in writing in the same concise way, but also information that is denser because of the text/visual combination);
and b) pointing to the massive presence of AV documents, which – I think – is already a reality –… in all kinds of use cases / scenarios (see above)
– then, in contrast to (assumed) ‘user base’, I do think it´s productive to try to discuss an app on it´s intended territorial base / purpose / vision (– i.e. as proclaimed tool for ‘intelligent collection, organizing, editing and annotation’ for ‘documents of any kind’ for the purpose of ‘analysing, connecting and archiving’); also because there needs to be a shared understanding of that btw. developers and community of this (or rather: of what it means, entails etc.)
I am also aware and understand this is somewhat more complex and delicate in the case of an app like DT which proposes a more general 'document cultivation, as opposed to propositions like MarginNote, which allows for different things but – in principle – is based rather around one specific file format (PDF) and one use dimension (annotation / excerpting) and further ‘downstream’ processes…
… as to ‘knowledge worker’ as sociological category: yeah, let´s drop that. in a theoretical direction I´d rather bring up Lyotard, Lévy, Castells… but certainly am with you on not being boxed by Drucker and such. again to ‘boil down’ and simply put, my suggestion was this: a) ‘intelligent collecting, archiving, editing and organizing’, even more ‘analysing, connecting and annotating’… all that simply is ‘knowledge work’ – and that is certainly what we are all doing with DT; and b) documents are now in substantial scope non-textual (or rather para-textual) timeline-based, and this brings its own demands, structures as to all categories of a).
– one of the questions / directions to look at here is in what ways DT help or could help with ‘analysing, connecting and annotating’ video; and see in what ways it can tie in with other programs doing this (which brings us back to questions of technical standards; as currently YT-chapters seem the only example where an exchange w/ external systems really works as to timelines)
AW2307 systematized this question of internal affordances vs. third-party-apps alongside DT quite succintly:
- agree 200%.
that is why I opened a discussion / survey in a rather ‘practical’ framing in the DT-scenarios section (– which for the very reasons you give might be the more appropriate context here.)
(I´d also be interested in how you use video; and why there is no need for adressing the internal structures, even though you seem to use it extensively. in other words: if you use it extensively and intensively – why is there no need for something akin to headings, underlinings, chapters, index etc.?) 
4.& 5) I am not sure I understand 100%, resp. I am not sure it is still the same issue. but I can somehow relate to this question of how a) to deal with the sheer size of AV-files and b) how to imagine an intelligent catch-all, all-in-one bucket app that deals with all my data-demands in one place – and across the network of devices 
as to a) I am in the indexing faction, which in principal solves the concerns you seem to raise.
as to b) I am still marveling about DTs ability to have on-demand / managed downloads – and still index all items…! given that the real bottleneck in your 4TB scenario seems the network/intermittent server, this is as close as it gets to full data availability in a single app!
thanks again for your nunanced input / feedback / thoughts!