It seems like there's no ideas yet that I haven't thought of, or tried or have seen, yet. I'm hoping to see a suggestion that I have seen or thought of yet, that will be what I want.
It might be helpful if you explain why you don't like any of the ideas here. I mean, nearly every way of organizing something is represented here, so there must be something special you have in mind. If you can find a way to articulate that, that would be helpful because it's easier to solve a specific problem than to randomly toss out ideas.
For example, in my case I needed quick access to the E12 series resistors. I ended up with one of these:
http://www.grainger.com/product/AKRO-MILS-Cabinet-3AJ39?s_pp=falseand organized the resistors like this:
100 150 220 330 470 680
120 180 270 390 560 820
1.0k 1.5k 2.2k 3.3k 4.7k 6.8k
1.2k 1.8k 2.7k 3.9k 5.6k 8.2k
etc, etc. Down the right side (in the unused two columns) go resistors from 10 to 82, and also some of the oddball ones...1M, 1.5M, etc....basically, unused crap except for special circumstances. Pretty much, 99.9% of what I need for resistors are in that box, and they're intelligently organized so I can very quickly find what I need...like values are near each other as opposed and periodic, as opposed to just putting everything in order, which actually makes a jumbled mess and makes no sense to me.
Anyhow, this scheme works very well for my specific need, trading speed for storage efficiency, and works especially well when mixing regular carbon resistors with higher precision metal film. When you do that, storing by decade gets a little error prone as the multiplier will obviously be different because three digits are necessary instead of only two. When I'm in a rush, the last thing I want to be doing is mental gymnastics trying to remember what color is what. I'm pretty good at it, in fact, but I STILL make stupid mistakes.