I've never quite understood the hate either. But the way I see it is that it's not fundamentally inferior to explorer, but rather just has annoyances and warts that Apple has bizarrely not fixed for decades which makes tedious to use for anything other than casual browsing.

You can still navigate by path via cmd+shift+g (this works in the file picker too), but I feel like the popup animation used to be a lot quicker on older versions. You can customize views, but to get them to actually stick you have to use an arcane incantation (delete all existing ds_store, then go to view options menu and hit "make default").

You can cut-paste but you have to use cmd+c and cmd+option+v instead of cmd+x. There is an option to merge, it only appears under conditions: only when copy/pasting and only when "alt" is held in the dialog I think.

It also is really bad at browsing networked volumes, partly due to poor defaults as it tries to litter ds_store and generate thumbnails.

Opening a new tab always takes you back to the root directory instead of cloning your existing view. All of it is stuff that could be added in a simple point update rather than a ground-up rewrite.