Agree on all counts, these bump folders don’t preclude any of what you said however. I’d agree that seeing them used as the /home/articles folder would be the mark of a lazy developer and a missed opportunity for an articles root page but they’re really more for the content editors to organise their content as they please without having to resort to large flat lists of items.

The initial container items created by the developer should as you said be unique templates configured for their purpose in mind. You could however also have multiple variants of the bump folder (articles, offices, etc) each with its own set of insert options etc.

Also top tip on reconfiguring the “Layout not found” pages, typically I would do a recursive test of every item using WatiN to check for missing presentation, xslt errors and any other problems and leave the 404 errors purely to missing items.

Doh, forgot to add that I’m using a set of extension methods alongside my solution, all my sitecore projects now come with:

public static string GetFriendlyUrl(this Item item)
{
return LinkManager.GetItemUrl(item,UrlOptions.DefaultOptions);
}

First of all, the “Folder” template (or similar all-purpose templates) should never be used – its a dead sure sign of lazy developer practise. If you need a container item, create a specific one for the purpose. This saves you from other future bad practises like putting insert options or layout directly on content items. A specific folder can therefore have specific functionality relating to the context (move to parent/first child/frontpage/whatever).
Secondly, the “Layout not found” page can be overridden in the config file, which then can handle all the unexpected errors appropriately, ie. by returning a 404 to the end user (use OMS to track the unexpected visits to pages without layout).