Perhaps we’re talking at cross purposes, maybe because I’m not conceptualising things hypertextually. If it were possible to address the linkbase in Tinderbox, e.g. LinkBase.contains(“inhibits”), then I would agree that there was one. The fact that they’re stored in one place in a file seems to me of no consequence: if TB were to store all the images that occur in the $TEXTs of notes in one place in the file there would not then be an “ImageBase”.
I have used most of the operators you’ve listed. Indeed, I may have been among those whose input shaped some of the demand for and implementation of those operators. See: How to create a label for link without creating link-type
Suppose I have a link type “inhibits” that describes an inhibiting relation between the ideas in two notes. And links of this type are used in various places. Now suppose I’d like to find all the inhibiting relations in my TB file. So far as I understand, I’d need first to collect all the notes with links using linkPath, then I’d need to iterate over all the notes returned, calling eachLink on each note, and iterating over each link to find those whose link type was “inhibits”. If there were a linkbase, I could query it directly, as in my imagined syntax above.
The first requirement is to be able to keep notes related to the link itself, for example explaining some details about what the link is describing apart from its link type. Today, we can do this with link notes, but so far as I understand it is still not possible to access or set the note text programmatically. We talked about it a bit in the thread above. Link notes are good, but just as $TEXT is better with attributes, so too would link notes be better with attributes. Again, searching against the notes in the link base is not possible.
If links were solely to facilitate hypertext, then there would be no need for what I’m describing. But it seems obvious from how others speak about links, link types, and the properties of links already existing that they are using links to encode information, knowledge, relationships, etc. not just connections to other notes. To give an example, suppose that you want to indicate that x, y, and z, are jointly sufficient to inhibit A (by jointly sufficient, you might substitute, A is inhibited only when x, y and z are present) it will not do simply to put a ‘sufficient’ link type between each of A and x,y,z because it is ambiguous in its meaning between any of x,y,z is sufficient for A and the case when they’re jointly sufficient. Moreover, suppose that A is jointly inhibited by x,y,z and a,b,c then six links of one type will fail to capture what is intended.
Now as Mark B noted, if you had links to links, you could then have inter-link links of type ‘jointly’ between x, y, z to indicate this. Or you could have an attribute jointWith of list-type that would hold the paths of the other notes (to include potentially those in other places in the outline hierarchy).
The problem can be generalised to any part-whole relation where as it were the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts. In that case, simply knowing that x,y,z and are parts of A is not sufficient to know under what conditions A has the property of being whole. As I say, this can be generalised in more than one way. This is important for sequences too, e.g. x is only an inhibitor of A when y has been previously operative on A and then only when z has been operative on A.
There are lots of use cases for modelling the interactions of elements in a system, for when someone could or could not have known something, and more besides. I think I described some more I think in the thread linked above from message #32 onward. I believe I described some of the original use cases for replicants et al in this thread Hard Links and Tinderbox++
I’m not saying that one cannot bodge or kludge around the limitations of TB to do much of this, one mostly can but in ways that are fragile and require remembering how you did them rather than encoding their structure into the structures TB offers. You ask which PKMs permit what I want. None so far as I know.