Struggling to understand the benefit of nested tags

[Technoguyfication]

I'm getting started with TagStudio now, and I'm going through my media coming up with different tags for my content. However, after using the nested/parent tags for a while I'm beginning to think it's adding more complexity than benefit. Let me explain:

Tags are supposed to be just that: tags. Each tag means exactly one thing, and you can attach multiple tags to an item. You apply these tags according to any categories an item may fit into. This is a many-to-many relationship. For example, let's say I have a Minecraft meme. I could add the following tags:

• minecraft
• gaming
• voxel
• meme
• nostalgia
• mojang
• microsoft

...and probably many more.

This is what tags are designed to do. I can search for any of these tags and pull up all items in the library with the tag. The issue, from what I can tell, starts when we introduce nested tags. Logically, it may make sense to nest the tags like this:

• gaming
  • mojang
    • minecraft

This seems great at first, since I can search for "gaming" and pull up Minecraft without having to add that tag to it. However, it becomes exceedingly difficult to determine what tags an item actually has, since adding one tag can implicitly add multiple effective tags. You could solve this issue by displaying the entire tag tree in the UI, but at that point, why not just apply all the tags?

It's entirely possible that I'm not using the system properly, but from a UX perspective it seems unnecessarily complicated to do the tag inheritance when the same behavior could be accomplished by adding multiple tags to the item.

It should also simplify the structure of the database since you don't have as many relationships between tags to keep track of.

Thoughts? I don't want to be the person that barges into an already developed project and immediately starts questioning design decisions as if I was around since day one, but I am curious about this decision and it's implications on UX and database complexity.