I believe Workbench needs a lot of improvement from its usability point of view. And you only coved the tip of the iceberg. It lacks so many things...
Besides browser mode, we need Status bars, Control bars, Icon tool bars, Shortcuts, Quick access to recent/most used objects, integrated search, a Navigation/Address bar, a Quit menu entry that actually works, an easier built-in method to customize all menus, MagicMenu functionality, a tree view, and I could go on forever, unfortunately.
The problem is that Workbench is so much behind that it will require a lot of manpower to get to a reasonable state where we can see it as a friendly partner within AmigaOS.
So dont't expect those changes will come out in the short term. Hopefully some small incremental changes may start to appear.
I go back and forth on this in my head. I'm just not sure that all of that NEEDS to be part of the OS. I use, and like, Amiga OS because of its simplicity. So much of it is just so obvious to use. I agree that some times those things can be very nice, but the beautiful thing for me is that it is easy to add them if I really want them with other utilities. Sure, it might perhaps be nice if they were built in, but I enjoy being the one in control of the choice.
Amiga OS is nice, lean, and fast. No it doesn't have every possible feature built in, but if I wanted an OS with everything and the kitchen sink built in, I'd use Windows. Is there really anyone who thinks that that bloated piece of "stuff" is nice, lean, or fast
It only takes gigahertz processors, gigabytes of RAM and gigabytes of hard drives to match the performance that I had 20 years ago with an 040, 18 megabytes of RAM and a Video Toaster.
Amiga OS certainly isn't perfect, perhaps far from it, but for what I use it for, it ain't half bad