Can the Drupal taxonomy be better?

Durpal's taxonomy are great. but it still have somethings can not be solved.
When a website gets huge and wants to classify it's information to the point that it's totally accessible though any way, taxonomy system can use a huge amount of resource.

A few category problem seems impossible unless one knows how to perfectly define vocabularies. For a personal example, let's say there is are two vocabularies, time and space. An item appeared in China at 2001, and also appeared in US at 2003. So this item will be tagged:
Space: US, China
Time: 2001, 2003
but, the space are not directly associated with the time, one with no knowledge about the item can inferred the item also appeared in China at 2003, a wrong statement. When I was the Space and Time vocabularies, I found it makes perfect sense, user can browse by time or by space. until I finally meet a problem like this and have to consider redefine the vocabularies. The only solution requires the removal of combine 2 vocabularies. Create terms like "China 2001" inherit from "2001" and "China". If we think about it. For many cases, there can be only 1 term directly inherits 2 term, those times I like to think it as a synonym of 2 term combined. The disadvantage will be a huge amount of database usage, say, there are 200+ countries and human have recorded history for more than 5000 years. If the original database contain like 5000 terms now, it should be over million terms.

Are there better solutions? Is the solution lays on having a more powerful taxonomy module?