I'm not sure what you mean, but it'll be fun answering your question nevertheless - and in the process try to figure out a prob of my own that's been bugging me as well :)

If you have multiple monitors, say 4 (since I have quad-head here), perhaps you can open multiple folders, say 2-4 folders opened per display, viewing more content spanning different levels simultaneously, create a mosaic of files. I haven't tried this myself but I imagine that it'd get messy and confusing, but if you want to see global connections you have to use something like a mosaic, because you can't see much in only one or two instances of Explorer (since I have windows here) even with folder pane enabled (too many clicks to go back and forth), and even if you had tabbed windows. Multiple views, gestalt, seeing patterns.

One thing I wish I could do is drag and drop items into a sandbox and experiment with their interactions but without altering the original items in the process. Say if I were trying to edit a movie from raw footage spread over 100 folders with each folder containing 100 video clips. There is no easy and quick process of mashing all of these 100's of clips together in a random fashion like different coloured chunks of plasticine and then seeing what you have created - and then starting all over again from scratch. By quick I mean 1-2 minutes. If I tried to do this right now with my video editing application, dragging clips onto the timeline one at a time, it would take hours to create a single iteration. No, I need another way of doing this.

Maybe what I need is to reduce the data to words, symbols and play with these on a piece of paper like math. I could go back to programming in c and..

Oh, I don't know, have I gone off? Then...to be continued elsewhere I guess.