There's a suggestion that that has less to do with inherent issues and more with wanting to display more information than can be obtained from whatever the Windows API calls stat(2). An indexer can actually help a great deal here, but I don't know if that's actually the issue - I should be getting a work-issued Windows 10 box pretty soon here, and look forward to experimenting for myself.

That said, even the slowness under discussion doesn't actually hang the UI thread. That's something you have to be pretty special to get so badly wrong, in this day and age where even web devs are learning better than to do expensive work in the main thread, and have the tools available to avoid doing so.

Might another option be to have the default view be "List"? I'm not sure if that's possible, but I've been wanting to do this for years.

In everything from XP through 7, you can. Select the view you want to make default, then press Alt to display and activate the menubar. In the Tools menu, choose Folder Options; on the View tab, click Apply to All Folders. Current Explorer windows may need to be closed and reopened to show the change; all newly opened windows from now on will take the view you chose as their default, but also remember any changes you make to a given folder's view.

I generally prefer Details view myself, but know no reason why this shouldn't work for List or any other. Enjoy!