Filesystem - hiding system folders?

[Chanchao]

Hi,

[Warning] Stupid question alert: If you're an accomplished Linux guru,
chances are that the following will make your toes curl into cramped
blobs.[/warning]

Would there be any merit in hiding (or moving) all the system folders
that are currently present in the root folder?   I notice that on
Windows it's rather straightforward these days; user files & settings
(home) are in 'Documents and Settings', applications are in 'Program
Files', and anything else is in 'Windows' and that's pretty much it.

On Ubuntu however there's a whole forest of system folders with names
that don't make it really obvious what they're for.  Newbie users might
think 'gosh this is complicated.. if anything goes wrong then I'd have
no clue whatsoever where to look or what to do'.

There's: bin, boot, cdrom (can live with that one), dev, etc, initrd,
lib, lost+found, media (can live with that one too, but isn't cdrom
'media' as well), mnt (hey, didn't that all go in 'media'), opt, proc,
rofs, root, sbin, srv, sys, target, tmp, usr and var.

That's a heck of a lot.. I know a lot of this is legacy unix stuff, but
thinking outside the box for a bit: is it really necessary to have that
all out in the open, visible to any newbie user?

I'd have one folder for users and their files and settings (home), one
(ONE!) place where any kind of media or drives get mounted, one folder
for system-wide settings (currently named etc I guess though 'etc'
doesn't really mean anything), one folder for applications and then one
folder for everything else; system files, libraries, the lot.

So:
/
|-home
|-programs
|-drives & media
|-configuration
|-system

Feasible? Easier/friendlier?  Would Unix/Linux people using other
distros feast on our bones if Ubuntu went that way even more than they
already do?

Note that I'm talking mainly about what the user SEES when opening a
nautilus file browser window, I can understand it if physically on disk
this is impossible because Ubuntu depends on so much (system) software
that expects certain things in certain places.

Cheers,
Chanchao