I'm not sure you can blame the GNOME people for not trying. Personally, I feel like they are actively trying to make it worse, ie they are not passive. Their approach to file system dialogs (open file/folder, save file), was what got me to finally realize, that I must necessarily prefer KDE, because I must necessarily prefer anything that is not GNOME. Now if I could only figure out how to stop KDE from opening file dialogs ALWAYS BEHIND ALL OTHER WINDOWS, that would be even better, but you can't have it all..
One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"
> One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"
You click the previous folder in the navigation bar.
What's the problem with GNOME's approach to file system dialogs? I really like their portals approach. On GNOME you get a Nautilus based picker, on KDE a GNOME app gives you the KDE file picker and if a platform doesn't provide a file chooser portal you get the GTK internal fallback picker.