I agree 100%. Been using macs for 15 years now, but the windows XP explorer in particular was fundamentally objectively better than finder, and it's nuts they haven't figured it out.

One of the things I find most baffling is that in order to "go to a folder by path" (e.g. ~) you have to hit command-shift-G ? What kind of hidden witchcraft is this?

It feels like it was designed for people who cannot understand a directory structure. But even that is done poorly, because it's not particularly useful. That said, this kepter thing looks pretty bad too.