Once I got used to column view, I miss it on other operating systems. I don't feel like there's anything I can't do with two Finder windows in column view. And for everything else there's the terminal.

For the main pane? I used to have Windows Explorer with the column view in the main pane and the tree view on the left pane and it was perfect. I don't really mind Nautilus with the breadcrumbs on the top and columns in the main pane. But I think simply going up and down in a Finder window is quite hard unless you navigated there manually, but I'm usually in finder because of `open ~/Folder/Path` and so I end up manually going Cmd-G and typing my path in because it's too hard to navigate otherwise.

column view is the one saving grace of finder; the rest is best left untouched