As a linux user, I really wish that the Nautilus team wouldn't have changed some UI features all in recent major version changes - it makes me wish Windows Explorer from the Win 2000 area back sometimes.
I find Dolphin much better than Nautilus, it is probably the only traditional graphical file manager I have used that is better than Explorer. If you have a Gnome desktop set up it can be fiddly to integrate a KDE application with it nicely, but in my opinion it is worth it for Dolphin alone, one of the best engineered of the normal desktop Linux applications.
If you want to stick with GTK, Nemo is a fork of Nautilus just before all the features started being removed, which aims to stay more featureful like a traditional file manager. It's also a little bit more performant than Nautilus recently too I think, but both are still slow compared to eg. Thunar or Dolphin.
Dolphin is approximately as fast as mc for me at listing large directories, both the same speed as 'ls'. Which is quite impressive when you consider how much more metadata it will show than mc and that it has a full graphical widget displaying them with thumbnail previews. AFAIK mc can't even show mimetypes in the file list, but Dolphin will load them asynchronously after listing the directory as you scroll.
Ranger is pretty nice to work with as far as TUIs are concerned -- bulk rename, N-split panes, tabs, image previews... it does a lot, and the default view is surprisingly usable to look for a file.
The only thing I miss with it is a "goto" shortcut, à la vim sneak. Ironically, Dolphin or Explorer go to a file when you start typing its name. Don't get me started on GNOME searching files.
If you want to stick with GTK, Nemo is a fork of Nautilus just before all the features started being removed, which aims to stay more featureful like a traditional file manager. It's also a little bit more performant than Nautilus recently too I think, but both are still slow compared to eg. Thunar or Dolphin.