Well I'm kinda visual/directional when it comes to files and other data structures. Even before I had a PC that could run Windows, ie living in MS-DOS and certainly being aware of navigating and operating the file-system via CLI, I much preferred the blocky-ASCII-GUIs (with menus and "windows" and panes, usually both mouse&keyboard-capable) of Borland, MS and many other software vendors incl "commander"-type fie managers. So.. probably a very longstanding "habit" thing.
The irony is in those days the "power-user" in general was adamant to get as quickly and as far away from the CLI as they can, even though they need to know some basics to automate script and launch stuff. Other than the odd GNU beard. Whereas the 2017 generation loves the CLI, would never have predicted such a thing! =) I've found time and again that once one operates with more than 1 or 2 dozen commands, it's disturbingly often `command --help` or `man command` first because there are only words (that vary from command to command) absent a program based on and supporting the rich set of commonly-used, de-facto-standard spatial gestures and interaction primitives that have evolved over the years.
Of course, not exactly comparable, but it's pretty amazing.
Your pwd opens up in vi and you can edit it as you see fit. When you :wq! all of the filename changes you have made get written to the directory.
It also has a well integrated terminal with directory tracking, so it is straightforward to switch between command line and graphical operations.
Have you checked out Nemo, which is basically the good old, full-featured Nautilus?
Totally disagree. I hopped from OS to OS for over a decade every other year or 3 (Win, OSX, Linuxes with various DMs/WMs) and it's always, always an adjustment period from "WTF is this" to "totally productive with this now", usually a matter of 1-2 weeks. Happy with Fedora/Gnome right now but have to say just Explorer itself beats Finder and Nautilus (rebranded as "Gnome Files" apparently now) for keyboard users when it comes to out-of-box file managers.
The weird new tiles/metro UI stuff they tried pushing from Win 8 is of course a pretty bad attempt to Microsoftify the "secondary desktop layer" concept that has been prevalent on the other OSes for longer, and better. It sucks, but also useless and thus not used for many/most power users I'd guess.
The rest of the "UI" question is in the hands of individual independent app developers, as it properly should be.