Yeah - that was the thing. To traditional mac users, the finder wasn't a file-browser, full stop. It was a document viewer. Each folder was a document.

What would have been really nice would have been to get a clear, visually-distinct instance of both; to get a really clear "this is a file browser" tool in the finder, and a really clear "this is a folder" tool in the finder.

They're both really useful tools to have - what was awful wasn't gaining a file browser, but was how they mixed file browsing and folder viewing into this awful pea-soup thing that damaged a bunch of the value points of both tools.

I really like having a file browser, but there's a LOT of value to having something that treats folders as individual, stateful documents.

It's an interface wrought in the era of 720K floppies where there was a limit to how much hierarchy you would need to plow through to get somewhere.

This is an oversimplification. Unix trains people to think in terms of requiring deep directory hierarchies because the Unix implementation cannot exist without them (I'd argue some of this is due to historical cruft becoming enshrined over the decades). The OS X Finder never managed to bridge the gap between the elegance of the old Finder and the raw utility of the NeXT browser interface.

Something else, anecdotally: NeXT people never used the workspace to actually do anything. They always went to the command line to copy/move files and do other file management things. My takeaway was that the workspace was mainly a proof of concept.