What's the best way to organise your library?

Question

I'm just getting to grips with Aperture and something has struck me. I'm not sure my existing libray is the best way to store my photos now I'm using Aperture.
Before using Aperture I had two folders called Digital Negatives and Final Prints.
Inside the Digital Negatives folder I then had sub folders named after the shoot date e.g. 25-03-2007 and inside these were all the RAW files I shot on that day.
Inside the Final Prints folder I then had sub folders named after what I was shooting and the date e.g. The London Eye 25th March 2007 and inside this where all the high res TIFF files I had created from the RAW files in the other folder.
As for naming, all files retain their orginal file name so a TIFF file I had converted from a RAW file would be called something like CRW_2878.TIFF and the matching RAW file would be CRW_2878.CRW.
What I've done is to create two projects from within Aperture called Digital Negatives and Final Prints and imported the respective photos into these projects as referrenced material and I am well into the whole keywording process.
Having now used Aperture for a few days I can see and appreciate how Aperture works and tracks versions even versions that have been edited in Photoshop so I'm thinking that instead what I should have done was to create a unique project for say each location/event I shot and then import both the RAW and TIFF files into this project and then stack each RAW file with it's corresponding TIFF file.
Question: Is this the best way of organising a large existing library consisting of RAW and TIFF files?
Question: Is there a way or a need to tell Aperture that a particular TIFF file is a version of a particular RAW file?
Question: Is there a way of 'merging' all these photos together so that I don't loose all the keywords and stacks etc that I've already added.
20" iMac   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Answer 1

One amateur's guess: you're coming to the right conclusion.
Since you never actually work on the master itself, yet can always see it (by pressing 'M'), there's no need to make master/other an organizing principle. Events, or something that anchors images' categorial whereabouts in your memory, seems more useful. (Keywording is essential anyway.)
If your TIFFs are made by editing in an external editor, they'll get stacked with the originals automatically. Otherwise you'll have to do that. In any case, what you'll probably need to do is either
a) search on Text such as "tiff" to locate files of various kinds, and move bunches of 'em around that way, and/or
b) in the Browser go to List view and use the "sort-by" columns to group the things you want to move.
You should be able, one of those ways, to reorganize your images in fairly large chunks.
Warning: doing massive reorganization in a library seems to produce problems sometimes -- wrong thumbnails, running out of disk space. See various recent posts. It's probably safest to do a relatively modest amount of reorganization (moving images from one Project to another) at a time, meaning quit and restart Aperture between times.
Others can give you more pro advice, though.