i have a big system with roughly 200 devices, about 22 folders and still growing slowly. i could probably trim that down some. i have a few to divide up the light controls across different levels of my house, plus outdoors, one is used experimental stuff, one for sonos system, one for HVAC-related, one for infrasturucture, sprinklers, weather, plots, etc.
i can play games with the names to place certain folders at the top or bottom of the list, but can't actually control the order the folders appear.
suggestion: add manual ordering of folders.
AFAIK, indigo provides no way change the UI-visibility of entire folders. Even if all the devices in a folder have their "Remote Display" attribute turned off, it appears that the folder still shows up.
suggestion: add a Remote Display attribute for folders.
a connected idea: i would suggest that a strict hierarchy is a bit over-constraining and that the indigo interface might be better served by supporting "tags" or additional metadata to provide more flexible ways of accessing related groups of devices. for example, devices could have metadata attributes like
floor (e.g., 1, 2, 3, Basement),
room (e.g. "Master Bedroom", "Kitchen", "Garage", etc.) and/or arbitrary user "tags" that could label arbitrary related groups of devices like "security lighting", "exterior lights", "occupancy sensors", etc. then instead of a strict simple hierarchy of folders, the more meaningful groupings of devices could be accomplished with something more like "smart folders" which select/group items based on their metadata/tags. i've raised this idea in past posts
as far back as 2007. if they were added, these "virtual" folders or selectors might also be supported in control pages, allowing you to specify a group of items to be presented on a page by metadata criteria rather than only by manual repetitive placement of items on a page - which feels to me like it would greatly increase the usefulness of control pages.
suggestion: add more device metadata (e.g., floor, room, phase, circuit, ...) and/or tags.
suggestion: add "smart folders" which are like folders but defined by selectors based on logical combinations of criteria based on device properties or metadata
suggestion: add app and web UI support for smart folders