You don’t let every decision to the user, you make good defaults, but leave the option to override to the user! And thousands isn’t scary as long as groups/tags/search work, so what’s ridiculous about empowering the user?
Increasing the number of different possible combinations of settings your software can be running with by a factor of one nonillion is not a choice I’d make if I wanted to have any confidence in its reliability and security.
That's why you write small programs. It won't take long for most programs to bloat to the level where they're dealing with nonillions of combinations, whether the user has control over those combinations or not.
