In my opinion treeviews are overused, therefor I don't really care for them. Sometimes they're necessary but I can imaging that one could always find a good alternative to the standard treeview.
What are some other innovative ways to display hierarchical information that convey the same information without the drab of a treeview? Which one(s) are the best? Should I just be happy with the treeview because that's what everyone knows how to use?
First off - I don't necessarily agree that TreeView's suck. TreeView is a fairly clean, standard, understandable way for people to work with a hierarchy of items.
That being said, there are many other alteratives. You can have multiple lists, with a way to go up/down in the tree. You can have something like Vista's file browsing, where you have an address area with a list under, and can drill down. There are many other options.
TreeViews end up being used in many cases, though, because it's one of the more concise ways of displaying a hierarchy, and it's obvious that you're looking at hierarchical data.
What I find works well is a combination of more advanced controls and tree views combined together. For example, take Outlooks explorer bar setup. I think that works well.
Take a look at Quince for some UI (they call it UX) inspiration. Search for hierarchical.
Examples include patterns such as Cascading Lists and TreeMap.
From those, you can click the "related" button to see even more ideas.
I totally agree some hierarchical data structures may have a better representation than a standard tree view (like genealogical trees, binary search trees, ordered graphs, etc.).
I doubt "one could always find a good alternative to the standard treeview" though, i would just replace "always" with "sometimes" :).
However, this is a very good subject to think of and I'm very curious what others have to say so here's my +1 for the question.