Similarly, my game has Managers for entities, collision components, and renderable components. With each one of these, I don't want to try to dump all of the data in one place where the access patterns become strained, I want them to be "managed" from afar, where there's an interface to easily query or update them.
Yeah, from my own experience the 'manager' metaphor is just easier for understanding the flow of execution & adding-new-features/maintenance.
Everything is in one place, and when the systems do need to communicate it is usually in pretty well defined ways (eg. physics manager ticks--> passes collision data to entity manager which ticks--> passes scene data to render manager which draws the screen, etc)
I'll go with whatever pattern works best in the name of Just Getting Stuff Done (with my own limited brainpower).
