If Evernote doesn't work for you, by all means use something else. While I understand the temptation to warn others away from a tool that hasn't worked for you (and have fallen prey to said temptation myself), I think it's best to accept that different things work for different people. It would be better if I could establish a habit to annually purge, but that's a fight for another day! Hope this helps. It's not a perfect way for handling reference material, but I find it to be good enough for now. When I want to recall something from reference, I use the search bar and search for my tags - personal development, words of wisdom, next time in, etc. When I want to keep something for reference, I will tag it, sometimes with several different tags, and then move it into the reference stack. The reference notebook has 1000+ items in it right now, and this is where I use tags. (I use some shorthand for the contexts so I can email myself something and add at the end, for example, to put it directly into the waiting for context.) The Next Actions Notebook is a 'stack' of ~15 other notebooks / contexts.

I use Notebooks for: Inbox, Projects, Horizons of Focus, Reference, and Someday Maybe, and Next Actions.

I use Evernote and I find it to be a pretty solid if you use both PC and Mac and different mobile devices.

Evernote gtd setup guide