I'm also curious - what about Windows Explorer makes it a painful experience? I learned how to use computers using DOS/Windows and it's what my idea of "correct" is. I'm curious about the other perspective.
* Directories are sorted separately as if they're some mystical entity that can't be mixed with files. Makes navigating by typing a PITA.
* List views can't show or sort by the size of directories.
* No spring-loaded folders makes drag and drop a huge PITA.
* I find the disclosure triangles to view multiple subdirectories in a single window extremely useful http://www.bgcarlisle.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Fi...
Just lots of little stuff like this.
Apple usually doesn't let you customize anything. That's why I can have things like Tortoise Git/Hg/SVN and Mac users cannot.
And in Yosemite they've started opened up the Finder more with official extensions support.[1]
I don't see how Dropbox can do the things it does in the Finder and you couldn't do Tortoise Git on the Mac. It's just that nobody has done it.
[0] http://totalfinder.binaryage.com
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Genera...
Anyway, talk is cheap - have a look at all of the shell extensions you can build with Windows and compare them to what you can do in OS X: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc1...