22111 wrote:

I think I have understood some former explanations in this way that CT
is a wiki, where you create new items from their links to existing
items, and this is not an outliner. Then, you can (from what I have,
perhaps wrongly, understood) built up specific outlines within ranges of
such "hypercards", in order to have quicker access to those
"cards"/items within that "stack"/range of items, but by no means,
you'll get a 10,000 items "tree" for your 10,000 cards, except manually,
this way, "put the current item to the current tree" or something.

So, if in the end you need an outline, with CT you will be lost, since
it will not deliver this outline, only partial outlines here and there
where the investment of your time and effort will be justified by your
ABSOLUTE need of an outline at least there, but for all the rest, you
will have to live with your wiki.

I think I see what you're saying... CT is never a "complete" outliner (unless you build it manually, as you say) in the sense that every single item is necessarily represented in one canonical outline as in a traditional two-pane outliner. However, in real life, CT's approach seems to be a feature rather than a flaw. Having multiple, arbitrary outlines representing a network of information solves a lot of issues related to trying to represent reality with a single tree.

For one thing, you can create any number of *limited* outlines that represent a view/snapshot that may be temporal, contextual, etc., while not modifying the underlying data. In other words, CT allows superimposing an arbitrary number of outlines over a data store that is not inherently hierarchical.

But if you insist that reality is a tree rather than a graph, you will probably be forever frustrated with CT.