Really stupid that you can't drag and drop photos from Finder into Events

Question

There is no way in iPhoto to do what I want and need to to, to wit, drag and drop photos from the Finder into existing iPhoto Events.
It really doesn't make sense that you can't do this. First of all, calling these groups Events to begin with is not smart; in my case, a group of photos in a folder on the Finder is rarely all from one photo session or so-called "event"--- instead of Events they should just be called Groups or something, and you should be able to drop individual photos into them. I have thousands of family photos that were accumulated on my hard drives over the years, some scanned in from film negatives, slides, or prints, others from digital cameras, and when I have changed Macs and hard drives over the years, every time a folder of photos was moved from an old hard drive to a new one, or regrouped into various folders, the photos seem to have acquired new dates of origin, etc.
Anyway, what I mean is, if Events are all time based, then somebody like me who has thousands of photos with all sorts of dates of origin, mostly unrelated to the date that the photo was actually shot, is screwed. I have old photos with new dates of origin and other mismatches between photos and the dates when they were actually shot or scanned.
My gripe is, again, that when I find photos on my hard drives that belong in certain iPhoto Events that have already been created, I cannot just drag these photos from the Finder and drop them into the Events they belong in. Instead, the stupid program creates a new Event from each photo I try to drop into an existing Event. That means I have to chase these new photos all over the place inside of iPhoto, trying to figure out where each new photo (now called an "Event") has ended up, so that I can drag and merge it into the Event I wanted it to go into in the first place. A real pain in the neck. It simply takes too long to do this for each photo added.
What this means is that iPhoto is not going to be a practical way to organize for a person like me until Apple makes it possible to simply drop any photo from the Finder into an existing Event. There should be an option to allow that. I'm really surprised there is not one. <edited out by Hosts>
Tom

Answer 1

Tom, iPhoto will not overwrite photos with the same name. I have plenty of photos with the same name in the same event. Each photo most likely has an internal handler that manages the photo, and not just the name of the file.
I agree with you that this is sub-optimal, and (IMO) I think what happened is iPhoto 6 had rolls, and they came up with a really cool interface for mousing over those rolls, and decided it was more consumer friendly (and because film is a thing of the past) to call them events, rather than rolls. I think it was worth a shot, but they just slightly missed.
Right now in iPhoto08, any serious organization is done in folders and albums. Personally, I think they need to combine the two concepts -- the great "mouse over" view of events with the organization abilities of folders and albums. I'd like an albums view where I can mouse over the albums. Actually, Aperture 2's interface for organization is more functional than iPhoto, so I am hoping some of that benefit creeps into the next iPhoto release.
What I do is: I use events for high level grouping (like Winter 2007) and I organize folders and albums to break that down further ("trip to Montreal" "Christmas" etc.). But I do it backwards. I fill albums first, then I organize events.
When I drag in pictures to iPhoto, first I make the target album in iPhoto that I want to populate, then I drag the photo directly to that album (not to events). iPhoto automatically puts the photo into the album I created and also into a new event. Later, I go into events, right-click on this new event to "open event in separate window" then I move around the events view, to drop in the pictures from the "import" event I just created. If I move all the pictures into other events, iPhoto automatically deletes the event I just emptied. You could skip the event organization all together if you wanted to, but you'd lose the cool mouse-over feature, which can be handy.
One nice thing about having events AND albums is you can have the photo just once in iPhoto, in an event, but then have the photo appear in as many albums as you want (as well as projects and web galleries) all while only having one photo on your hard drive. So, there are benefits to events, but I think iPhoto is missing just a couple little bits of organizational ability to make it perfect. (and yes, I've submitted this all to Apple as feature requests)
Just in case you don't know -- events don't have any hierarchy. That is, you can't nest events. But you can have folders with subfolders, and any folder can contain albums. Albums cannot have sub-albums, and folders don't hold photos. Only albums hold photos, and folders (or sub-folders) hold albums. Try create some folders and albums and you'll get the hang of it. One other issue that Apple needs to address. When you create a new folder or album, it doesn't put it right where you want it, but rather puts it at the bottom of the list, so you have to drag it up to where you want it. Try it out, and you'll see what I mean, then submit it as a feature request to improve that.
I agree it's not perfect, but it's not too bad once you get used to it. And the benefits of working with the rest of the features of iPhoto is worth it. I'm just really hoping they do a few tweaks on the next release. They are near greatness here. They could just use a little nudge on the last bits. (in my opinion of course. Others may disagree, but I've talked to enough people who have the same issues you are having to know we are not alone on this).