How easy is it to leave Zotero? (Either to move to a different paper manager, e.g., Mendeley, or to leave the paper manager ecosystem entirely.)
Can Zotero respect my filesystem organization (à la Lightroom)? I have thousands of papers organized, and don't want to move them all in (too much work, what if I don't like it?), but I also don't want to have two copies of some subset of the papers, which might not be in sync.
Can't comment on Zotero but in Polar we have a similar issue where we need to move over the PDFs. We're going to start using hard links so at least if it's on the same drive you can have the same copy just in two different places.
Respect the filesystem? Erm, again we're in the world of the murky where it probably is possible with Zotfile, but out of the box, it wants to rearrange them in to folders like 'MN8YD'. I've made my peace with that, but if you are very touchy about it, try it with a copy first and see how you get on.
Can Zotero respect my filesystem organization (à la Lightroom)? I have thousands of papers organized, and don't want to move them all in (too much work, what if I don't like it?), but I also don't want to have two copies of some subset of the papers, which might not be in sync.