Out of curiosity what mandatory features would you consider missing?

Having ideas is generally not enough.

Volunteers don't take requests. They take suggestions. They only act on the ones they want to.

If you want something to actually get implemented, offering a monetary reward, hiring a dev to contribute, or contributing yourself, is the best way to go.

I've gotten several features I wanted into software I use, by adding them myself.

The problem is not the lack of ideas, it is the programmers number and tech debt.

You can contribute to Dolphin KDE Plasma File Explorer: https://develop.kde.org/

I'd love to see COSMIC Files on par with Dolphin, and Dolphin is vastly superior to Windows file explorer in the first place.

You should make your own file manager. That’s usually why people with lots of ideas do when they want to skip the middle man.

But I agree the default GUI file managers are a bit lackluster. Although the idea of it looking anything like windows makes me nauseous.

Windows file explorer lacked tabs when dolphin had them for a decade or so and its still not even close to even the top of file managers. Also its terrible slow, unreliable, crashes often and has 4 different UIs baked in.

Do some plugins for Dolphin, I feel like they are neat because a) other devs that want to implement a function now have a blueprint for it b) with downloads/stars metric that these add-on stores provide you get a good idea of what the community actually wants.

File managers often have a bunch of plugins that add extra functionality. You could check those or try write your own for what functions you would like.

Whenever I have to use windows, the file manager is the thing that pisses me off the most. It's utterly terrible to use. No tabs or extra panes. Directories exist in some kind of unspecified limbo, like recycle bin and my documents. Multiple copying is done all at once instead of queueing. Files aren't organised cleanly or clearly. If you want to change config it's hidden in a menu somewhere, you can't just edit the config files directly. Gross.

Please, do elaborate.

i just want a tag based file explorer, but that's way harder to do and it struggles with the core architecture of the system

I mainly use Yazi, Dolphin and sometimes Double Commander inside my GameImages.

I like the workflow of Yazi its so fast and the plugins provide most features that I require. It is terminal based which I really started to like.