I'm glad I'm not alone. That weird columnar view mode (don't know the term for it) shown in the screenshot from the GP has to be the worst aspect of the Finder. I've been seriously considering getting a Mac laptop and now someone goes and reminds me about the Finder. But presumably there are 3rd party tools that fix the problem, right?
Some people swear by Miller columns for efficiency and are lost at sea without them. It's entirely a personal preference - if you don't like it, click on one of the other available layouts in the finder.
I don't like it because it's very wasteful of screen real-estate. I do want to see directory hierarchy, but I don't want my files list to be squeezed into smaller and smaller space so I can see lists of every sibling folder of every folder in the path down to the folder that I'm viewing. This view isn't useful in proportion with how much space it takes up. IMO, access to directory structure works better as a treeview, separate from the 'current folder' view, rather than as a new column for each step down into the hierarchy. The latter doesn't scale well.
If so, that view has been available in Finder since at least the first version of OS X I've used which would be 10.3 Panther. These days there are 4 different view you could browse files with in Finder: regular icons, cover flow (does anybody use this ever, by the way? it's the most long-winded, annoying and imprecise to browse anything including photos), column view and hierarchical view.
I was responding to the fact that someone put forward the column view as an example of how Finder was prettier than the Windows 8 Explorer, so yes, I do know that Finder has multiple modes. I would prefer a mode that doesn't conflate the folder navigation UI with the current folder view like that mode that you just mentioned. That'd be a better balance in terms of emphasis on the two aspects of working with a file system.
Huh, column view is one of the things I missed most from Finder. I loved how you could click and hold a file, and navigate through a directory tree just by hovering over each folder in the path.
