I don't think that my point is opposite. I find Finder to be so regressive that just more of the exact same would be a blessing. It's also entirely possible tha

I don't think that my point is opposite. I find Finder to be so regressive that just more of the exact same would be a blessing. It's also entirely possible that hierarchical file system browsing is a solved problem and Norton Commander or even XP MS Explorer is as good as it needs to be. I don't entirely buy that it's the final form, but sure I'd be fine if it were true. My suspicion with Finder is that it was deliberately made small and cumbersome to drive people to Spotlight. However at the time Spotlight was totally inadequate. The iOS platform started to take off and caring about that was shelved. To make up for that I used Alfred for years until Spotlight was updated. Alfred still has a leg up on Spotlight to some degree, like being able to run ssh commands. The Spotlight update came with what? Lion? To just make it pretty good? How Spotlight works is absolutely indispensable, but that doesn't leave me in a place where my workspace is cleaner and easier to navigate than if they just gave me Norton Commander along with it.