[dahart]

I don't disagree with your opinion, there's nothing wrong with liking command-o for nav.

But what I mean is that Finder navigating uses an unintuitive key chord you have to learn, while renaming uses a single key, and a large and very common/obvious/intuitive one. This does in fact mean the UX is declaring which one they expect to be more common. I'm not saying renaming is uncommon, but for me it's nowhere near the usage of navigating into a folder. Are you saying you're renaming folders more often than browsing into them? (How do you get to the folder you want to rename?)

Both Windows and Linux GUI folder browsers use the Enter key to navigate, and so do many other tree browser UIs including our web browsers. It's very common and very reasonable to expect Enter to navigate to the thing you've selected. This expectation and ecosystem of navigating this way means that Mac's Finder stands out as different and unintuitive, even within a Mac-only set of applications. I love my Mac, and I've also used both Windows and Mac since they first existed ... both for 35 years. But today's Finder is definitely weird and anachronistic compared nearly all other modern file browsers.