I, personally, don’t see the necessity of your proposed feature:
- First, obsidian is not intended as a file explorer but as a kind of zettelkasten, note-taking app or PKM system. Sure, its flexibility allows you to make use of it for a couple of other useful things but that’s not what it’s originally meant for. If you want to organize the files and folders on your hard drive, that’s what file explorers are made for, so make use of them. The strength of obsidian lies in its capability to connect different information regardless of where exactly they are stored. Thus, I would rather advice not to work with hundreds of folders and subfolders in obsidian as that doesn’t make much sense anyway.
- Second and strictly speaking, there isn’t any difference in what obsidian does and what you wish it would do - at least I can’t see the difference: if you click on a folder, you will see a list of all its subfolders - that is exactly the same result as compared to working with your file explorer! What do you mean with “terrible mess” here?
- I agree that often it would be helpful if one could navigate through files and folders by keyboard. Luckily, there are already a couple of feature requests for this, for example here, here or here.