Matt, I'm pretty sure we agree on a lot more than you let on. Ok, maybe not 100% of the things 100% of the time.

With Boxee, you just set some "watch" paths inside its preferences. Those paths will be scanned periodically for new content - a setting you can also adjust. It automatically sorts TV from Movies as well - you don't have to keep them in different places if you don't want to.

From the top level menu you have icons for Music, Pictures, Movies and TV. Click on one of those and you're instantly presented with the content. No drilling down.

You should download the beta and give it a shot. At least on the Mac, it doesn't install a ton of files all over the place nor does it set itself up for automatic launching or anything like that. Let it scan some folders and then check it out. The UI still needs some work, but it's still in Beta. One thing that MUST do before launch is to ignore "The" at the front of titles when sorting.

Boxee does also get some titles wrong. TO help you can make sure to include the year in the filename, but by the final release there should also be a way to manually tell it what the file is (as a correction). Hopefully there will also be a way to list the files that it has looked at but did not ID. Currently if you point it at a bunch of folders you will be told how many movies or shows it's indexed, but you won't know which ones it's skipped nor why. Kind of a PITA when you have 600+ movies and a couple hundred TV episodes.

BTW, I completely agree about the many button presses on the WDTV. I also noticed that (big time) but simply forgot to mention it.