Categorizing pages

I would like to be able to categorize pages. I’ve seen several fairly old posts on this topic and the general response seems to be: ‘Pages aren’t meant to be categorized’. Well here’s several reasons why I would want to do this:

• The only option ATM is to organize your pages hierarchically, but the point about categorizing is that I can put the same page in multiple categories. With hierarchical organization a page can have only one category.
• When someone clicks on a category link on my blog I would like pages that are in those categories to be displayed as well as posts. ATM if I have a page hierarchy that happens to have the same categorization as my posts, this won’t happen.

Now I freely admit that many people may not want what I want and that’s fine. They can just not categorize their pages. For those of us who do want this functionality, we can just categorize our pages.

More immediately can anyone point in the right direction for adding this functionality as a plugin myself?

Thanks – Paul