Hmmm. In Aperture, if you want to relocate your masters you choose the menu item called "Relocate Masters".
But, like you, my joy is found in taking pictures. But that's why I like Aperture -- I don't have to care at all where on my HD my masters are. Why do you care where they are physically? One of my favorite things about Aperture is that it simply doesn't matter where they are. Using projects, and smart folders, and tags, and so on is a much more sensible, and dynamically useful, way to organize data. It's a paradigm shift. And it's only an illogical attachment to the old ways of thinking that we cling to that makes us need to know where on the HD a file is. Of course, even that is an abstraction, since the HD itself stores files not "in" folders but simply by allocation block. The operating system keeps track of where things actually are.
Anyway, I kind of think of it as a dresser drawer. In the old way of thinking, you'd put your socks in one drawer, t shirts in another, etc. In Aperture, though, I can create new drawers at will, say a drawer with only blue socks, or only all cotton clothing, or all shirts bought in 2007, or all my favorites. What drawer they are actually "in" is not, in many ways, a valid question.
