[vidarh]

Which makes me think the biggest problem with the file selector as described is not that it's flawed, but that it's hard to replace.

One of the thing I loved about the Amiga was that because of how the API was structured, it was easy to replace things like this, as you could patch every API endpoint. As a result, it took very little time before more advanced replacements for the standard file requester appeared. You "just" had to patch (via OS-provided functions) a couple of library calls.