@Karro - you got it now!

The whole exercise is because brushes, patterns, palettes, gradients, etc. all display in one big list and can't be categorized in gimp....

BUT, the next version of gimp will have searchable tagging for everything, afaik, so if you spent the time tagging (for example) all brushes, you could filter the brush list by typing in the filter box that will be provided.

-Rob A>