[iggldiggl]

> The UI in regards to navigating files in Windows is indeed a mess. A personal gripe that i have with it, that's even worse than some of what you named is the file open/save dialog - there's not just one (that would let you write the file path in the bar and thus allow you to copy paths from Explorer to it),

Note that even in the older-style file dialogs, that don't have that new (relatively speaking) breadcrumbs-style file path display at the top (like in Windows Explorer), you can still paste a path into the file name input box and it'll navigate to that folder. Relative paths also work. The only drawback is that the file name will then be reset to whatever it was when the dialog was initially opened, but other than that it works nicely.

> but many different ones for different programs! This essentially makes it so that using some software like GIMP and navigating around the filesystem with it is needlessly annoying!

The problem is a) backwards compatibility – programs can customise the file open/save dialogs to quite some extent, so they need to explicitly opt into using the new dialogs. Plus software that wanted to support older Windows versions (pre-Vista, so these days it's probably not that relevant any more, but during the Vista/7-era it definitively mattered) then needs to have code to handle both kinds of file dialogs. b) as far as I can tell, some cross platform frameworks use completely self-written file dialogs, which 1) usually mimic the older (Windows XP and older) style of Windows' dialogs and b) usually don't manage to copy all the features of Windows' native file dialogs, and instead often get some things subtly (or less subtly) wrong.

My personal gripe with the breadcrumbs file path navigation is that the breadcrumbs dropdowns don't support keyboard navigation like the main explorer window (or the file list in the file open/save dialogs) does, so when you have a folder with lots of subfolders and want to use the breadcrumbs to change the path, you then need to do lots of scrolling instead of simply being able to press a key.