[edit] it's Shift+Command+H for the home directory, which you were targeting specifically, Shift+Command+G lets you type in the path to any directory (with tab completion)
You can setup an OSX service to let you do it[1]. Doesn't really work for network shares through.
[1] see 4 from http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-copy-a-file-path-in-os-x/
Then just click on those labels. It's even faster than typing the path in Window's location bar.
Disconnect and they disappear, never to be seen again.
I agree Finder could use some work, but I find your criticisms odd. If anyone is fantastic at consistent, system-wide keyboard shortcuts, it's Apple.
What's worse is that choosing something known to be under the home, like Desktop or Documents, yields a bare window with no way of seeing what's above it, in any of the view modes.
Eventually users will discover "Go" menu (yeah I guess Home is someplace I might want to "Go" - but I assumed that's where I already am and that it was just a view issue). Go menu seemss a pretty odd place to stash such an important location.
Not going to bite on the subject of requiring a three-finger solute just to go home ...
Seems a lot of people don't know about holding command then clicking on the folder in the title bar to view the hierarchy. I'm not sure what I think of that because I think once it's learned it's a pretty decent solution to the problem. Discovery is an issue though.
In the end I still say the Finder isn't perfect, but I find most complaints against it are from people that haven't learned it very thoroughly.
For more typical users it's a bigger problem I think, because they never learn to organize their files. I've seen the results of this with users having a Documents folder containing just a huge list of files with no organization whatsoever - just grouping some related files to send to someone else was a big chore. Theoretically, tagging is superior to a folder hierarchy, but most people just don't "get it" with tagging and never will. Tagging is not even very good for power users, because they will often use software that doesn't see the tags (cross platform editors/IDEs).
I don't disagree that Apple has done a good and thorough job with their keyboard shortcuts. I never felt motivated to learn these myself though because I spend a lot of times on various other platforms, where that muscle memory would be actually detrimental. This is as opposed to e.g. IDE/emacs/vi muscle memory which caries over pretty well across platforms.
But I just think Apple has taken a big step backwards by hiding home in favor of "All My Files". If you have a couple of repos under your home, or anything else with a lot of files that get updated from time to time, then "All My Files!" becomes pretty useless. I think they've pushed too far towards the tablet mentality and that it doesn't suit desktops and laptops very well for the way they are actually used.
They even removed the little dropdown widget that used to show the folder hierarchy (looking for that thing is what wasted my time and annoyed me before finding home under "go" menu). And the status bar at the bottom that shows the used/free space on the machine is also gone (you can turn it back on under the view menu but why make busy people go fumbling around to find these basic things?). Ask most Mac users now how much space they have left on their drive, and watch them fumble around for several minutes...
These things are all so easy to fix!