[jmvoodoo]

I started a company that dealt with a lot of tree like data. It is possible to transform your tree structure into an indented list in O(n) time. This used to be one of our interview questions at the time. There are a number of ways to store your data in various SQL databases that allow you to quickly get and render segments of the tree as well without recursive queries.

Once you understand those concepts, then storing your data correctly as trees has a ton of benefits over indenting like this.

[sfn42]

If you don't need those benefits it doesn't really matter.

[moron4hire]

What people are saying in this comment section is that you're probably going to need it. You might not need it now, but the PM of today is a short-sighted person and the future always gets here.