I've been looking through lots of file managers and trying some, and always end up back with windows explorer.

It seems they are all crammed full of useless things and no longer simple and easy to use. So much for increased efficiency....

Besides the fact that I rarely use half this stuff, I can already do FTP, archives, viewing & editing different types of files, etc, with separate tools. Why bloat my file manager with these capabilities?

How much file managing do people really do anyways? I'm sure 95% of the time I have no use for the folder tree, let alone 2 or more panels plus tabs in which I can manage every different directory on my computer simultaneously. And I don't care to learn 200 new shortcuts either.

Any file manager should be portable and small so I'm not fumbling around trying to remember how to use Windows Explorer every time I'm on a computer that doesn't have it installed.

Windows Explorer is very good, there's only a few features missing from it like:
- pausing/queuing file transfers
- regex filtering
- better searching
- optional tabbing would be nice

I hope Microsoft will improve Windows Explorer in the future.

Anyways, one of the most important features I'd like to have (but haven't seen anywhere) is custom defined regex sorting schemes so I can traverse my digital music collection by year, label, artist, etc depending what I'm looking for.

I use Windows Explorer quite extensively and get along with it fine (does everything I need/want it to do, simple/intuitive interface, etc.), though my needs and use habits are probably quite different from yours.

With regard to your last point, foobar2000 works brilliantly as a file manager for a digital music collection (in addition to being a great player as well) and can do everything you describe through its database.