"Finder sucks" seems to be a meme perpetuated by commenters everywhere, but I have never read a convincing list of issues. When pressed, commenters have replied things like "it is well known that Finder is a big pile of crap."

I honestly have never found a problem with the Finder and miss a lot of its features (column view, drag file to file dialog, high-resolution previews for most file types, Quick View, and much more) when I'm in Windows or Linux.

First right-click for a session totally hangs the Finder for ~10 seconds, followed by the beachball, followed by a brief flash of the contextual menu. The next right-click works as expected.