Please, I beg you dear developer, replace my stupid MacOS finder with your superpowers!
It's like they designed it while watching High Fidelity: "I sorted my albums autobiographically. So if I'm looking for <this album> I have to remember that it's under albums I bought for a girl but ended up not giving to her." "That sounds like a great idea!"
Also, cmd-shift-G (the Finder shortcut for "Go to Folder...") will let you start typing a path.
Correct, and it's the first setting I change.
Finder > Settings > Advanced > When performing a search: "Search the Current Folder"
That said the Open dialog is a sad sack stand in for even the flawed Finder. 20 year Mac user here: I developed the muscle memory to just have a Finder window open to the file I want so I can drag and drop from that into the Open dialog.
That's a setting you set.
Right click on empty space > uncheck "Use groups"
Or in that context menu, select "Show View Options" and customize it to your liking. My liking is "Group by kind" (folders to the top) then "Sort by name"
Forklift has a couple of things that annoy me daily though. Often I will have to refresh a pane to see a file I know has recently been added. Eg in downloads. I may even have navigated to downloads after the download finished and it's still not visible until I refresh.
The other is that it doesn't reuse existing tabs if I "reveal in finder" or whatever, so after a while there's a million tabs open, most pointing to the same directory.
There is not an optional "set this as default" like browsers. Something we should really push Apple to do. Finder is trash.