Are you sure you are talking about the EVA9150 and not the EVA8000 when you say "No directory structure"? Besides being able to create a database for more refined searching (cover art, genre, artist, etc. which both models do), the EVA9150 also has "Live Folder Browsing". This allows you to browse directly to a shared file without having to do a scan first. You can turn this on by just going to the Supervisor menus and Advanced Setting -> Other and change the Folder Browsing selection to "Live Folder Browsing".

With Live Folder Browsing turned on you would just browse out to whatever network share you have the media on and start playing it. This would have saved you all the copying to USB drives etc. and would have allowed the "Boss wants to watch this now" scenario.

As for the internal hard drive, it's true that copying large amounts of data to the drive over the LAN or from a USB device isn't very fast. Luckily there are a few other options that users have come up with to get media on the drive. There are relatively inexpensive SATA to USB2 (or SATA to ESATA) converters that allow you to pull the drive out of the EVA and attach it to your PC, copy all the media over, then pop it back into the EVA. (The removable drive tray in the EVA makes this a breeze) This is much faster than copying over the LAN, and pretty much the only way if you're trying to move gigabytes of data. (Even over a gigabit network, hundreds of gigabytes of data would take a long time!)