Symbolic links don't give me an easily obtainable list of all "copies" of that file, and while they might survive atomic writes, they're also vulnerable to the "main" file being renamed/moved/etc.

(Of course the thing that'd solve my actual root problem would be proper OS and file system level support for tagging, but until then it seems that there are only imperfect solutions, each with its own set of drawbacks.

I.e. third party software is not well integrated with the file explorer and the file open/save dialogues etc., and now I'm dependent on that software lest I lose all my carefully tagged data, whereas hard or symbolic link-based solutions are clunky to use and vulnerable to either atomic saves or file renaming etc.)