Photo Mechanic has been among the favorite tools primarily focused on import and import automation for several years. If you simply want an import tool that is flexible and allows custom imports, I doubt you will find a more feature rich solution. That being said, it is not an editing tool, but one focused on import, especially multiple-card import and automation ( auto tag, multiple-destination copy, etc).

Since Lightroom, I no longer use specialized tools such as Photo Mechanic, Bibble, or heck, even Camera Raw. I barely use Photoshop any longer.

Now, to your second question. Can't say how nuts you are, as I think we all may be a bit bent for being such camera/photo geeks, but I suggest that relying on directory structure to provide you with information is so, well, DOS. Technically, you will be limited to certain characters, lengths, etc allowed by your current OS, and those same file names. Directories, etc may be truncated if you move or copy to a different OS. For example, do not copy your images to a FAT formatted disk, or older PC. And your camera won't be able to read them, not that I suspect that is an issue.

Instead, if you use tagging, collections, and IPTC metadata, you can gain much more flexibility. With Lightroom, I simply let the tool import with the default directory settings ( year, month date). I don't pay attention to this, as once imported, I add keywords, event and other info into IPTC tags, and then leverage Lightroom to create Smart collections, and to arrange images based on this info. So a set of images might be in 2011/May_3, 2011/May_2, and 2010/Dec_23, but in Lightroom, they are all in a group called Family Portraits.

The downside is this ties one to Lightroom a bit closer, but if you use IPTC, and embed the metadata in sidecars or even DNG, you should be future proof.