This seems unrealistic, because the topology on a manifold doesn't have anything to do with the properties its structure sheaf, but I figured I might as well ask. This wouldn't be the first time I was pleasantly surprised about something like this. If not, is there any sort of way to attack differential geometry with abstract nonsense?

Even though schemes have singularities, "it's better to work with a nice category of bad objects than a bad category of nice objects". Manifolds seem to be perfect illustration of this fact.

Edit: Apparently my question wasn't clear enough. The actual question here is if we can define manifolds entirely as "functors of points" like we can with schemes (sheaves on the affine zariski site)

This seems unrealistic, because the topology on a manifold doesn't have anything to do with the properties its structure sheaf, but I figured I might as well ask. This wouldn't be the first time I was pleasantly surprised about something like this. If not, is there any sort of way to attack differential geometry with abstract nonsense?

Even though schemes have singularities, "it's better to work with a nice category of bad objects than a bad category of nice objects". Manifolds seem to be perfect illustration of this fact.

Edit: Apparently my question wasn't clear enough. The actual question here is if we can define manifolds entirely as "functors of points" like we can with schemes (sheaves on the affine zariski site). There is no fully categorical and algebraic description of the category of smooth manifolds. When I say a "comprehensive functor of points approach", I mean a fully categorical description of the category of smooth manifolds.

This seems unrealistic, because the topology on a manifold doesn't have anything to do with the properties its structure sheaf, but I figured I might as well ask. This wouldn't be the first time I was pleasantly surprised about something like this. If not, is there any sort of way to attack differential geometry with abstract nonsense?

Even though schemes have singularities, "it's better to work with a nice category of bad objects than a bad category of nice objects". Manifolds seem to be perfect illustration of this fact.

This seems unrealistic, because the topology on a manifold doesn't have anything to do with the properties its structure sheaf, but I figured I might as well ask. This wouldn't be the first time I was pleasantly surprised about something like this. If not, is there any sort of way to attack differential geometry with abstract nonsense?

Even though schemes have singularities, "it's better to work with a nice category of bad objects than a bad category of nice objects". Manifolds seem to be perfect illustration of this fact.

Edit: Apparently my question wasn't clear enough. The actual question here is if we can define manifolds entirely as "functors of points" like we can with schemes (sheaves on the affine zariski site)