Really with metadata you can take it or leave it. Its up to you if you prefer trawling through folders looking for content or sorting each product into your own system, thats your prerogative.

Where metadata work well is when you select for example an item of clothing. You will see in the smart content tab all associated/compatible content. So when you have a clothing pack and an expansion pack for that product both will show in the smart content tab on the selection of an item. You can go into either the main product or the expansion and quickly change a material or add other items from a set.

I find the that a lot of poser content can be found in numerous different locations so can be painful to find, in Daz Studio at least. So other than sorting all content on installation I find Smart content adequately solves this problem by removing the location as relevant and creating associations between items.

But as I said maybe its not for everyone. But I find it increases my productivity and reduces time scratching my head trying to remember where the vendor had placed those extra Mat poses for a specific item.

Anyone want to tell me the correct place for material poses in a runtime? (It seems they can be in a lot of varying places depending on the vendors preference.)