The Local Configuration capability available on Workspaces is quite useful. You might want to define a privileged set of users who can create/manage Workspaces, including their Local Configuration. These users would also control the top-level of your document tree. You might think of a workspace as a unit of collaboration for a set of users.

If want to simplify the environment, you might consider preventing the creation of Workspaces within Workspaces. Then only Workspaces can be created within the WorkspaceRoot.

If you have a really large repostory, it is desirable to limit the number of ACL-combinations on Folderish (Workspaces, Folder, etc.) documents for performance reasons. One way to achieve this would be limit custom ACL management to Workspaces only.

Here are two differences that come to my mind:

• There is also no Local configuration available from the folder Manage tab.
• Nuxeo Drive relies on the folder document type, since it creates folders and not workspaces on the Nuxeo Platform side when users create a folder from their desktop.

It's possible that other features or addons rely on one of these two document types.