I receive hundreds of useless mails everyday (not filterable spam, just thing I don't care about or have no valuable information), so dealing with each of them to empty the inbox is a waste of time.
Most mail that matters come from specific people (close family, project members, current client...) so it's easy to search, the unexpected important mails and things that needs to be done later just need to be starred.
I feel it's really efficient when the signal/noise ratio is very low.
It sounds like you're doing an adaptation of Inbox Zero anyway. It's Inbox-Starred rather than Inbox Zero, which to me sounds like what someone would do if their email didn't have an archive option. Or for people that generally don't like archival.
Personally, I didn't like archival at first, but now I'm quite addicted to it
Most mail that matters come from specific people (close family, project members, current client...) so it's easy to search, the unexpected important mails and things that needs to be done later just need to be starred.
I feel it's really efficient when the signal/noise ratio is very low.