Morisy.com

I've been working on a (secret-ish!) side project recently that hopes to index a lot of profiles, and allow people to browse through and compare those profiles as convenient.

One thing I'm struggling with at this early stage is the taxonomy architecture. For example, one taxonomy will probably end up being based on geography. My first impulse was to structure the taxonomy like this:
USA
-Northeast
--New England
---Massachusetts
----Greater Boston Area
-----Somerville
-Southeast
--Etc, etc, etc.

I have since been informed that this is insane, or at least a moderately bad idea, particularly in Drupal. So my next idea might be equally insane: Just allow everything to be free tagged with vague prompts and a catch-all parent taxonomy, or perhaps assign some root taxonomies (location, genre, medium) with free tagging.