As a GNOME user:

A lot of development is ongoing in GNOME thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund. I’m curious what that will bring.

Also hoping that the proposed tiling functionality will be implemented.

Maybe Midnight Commander? I know it’s text based, but it’s really good.

Nemo can open a second pane. Never tried it myself though.

I think you’re judging a bit too harsh. Elementary has it’s faults, but it is (was) an interesting OS with a lot of unique ideas:

• The UI was gorgeous for its time, and in my opinion, their theme still looks better today than Adwaita and Breeze. They were among the first to offer global settings for light/dark modes, accent colors, and night light. It’s very consistent between applications, with a lot of attention to detail. Like they even had a custom icon theme for LibreOffice, just so it would fit in. In short, Elementary is much more than a simple “MacOS copycat”. This took a LOT of effort and it shows.
• The “pay what you want” appstore was a novel idea, and I am sad that it didn’t work out.
• The developer experience was quite good. They have excellent documentation that’s very accessible for newcomers, and for a while there were a number of interesting 3rd-party applications developed specifically for Elementary OS.
• They cooperated with competing and upstream projects, mostly through freedesktop.org, and heavily invested in Vala. They maintained the GNOME email app when upstream lost interest, and contributed to Gnome Web.
• Their included applications were really not that bad, and offered some unique features. For example, the file manager is probably the only one on Linux with Miller columns. And the terminal app is smart about CTRL+C, copying text when you want to copy text, and terminating the running process when that’s what you intended. I’m not exactly sure how it decides this, but it works perfectly.

They ran out of funding last year, and their lead developer left. I think that explains the drop in quality that you encountered. Elementary used to be a coherent and polished OS, in a time when most Linux distributions were still a bit messy. I was a happy user for quite a while. Sadly, many of their innovations turned out to be a dead end. Their appstore mostly contains toy apps that nobody wants to pay for, Vala has lost traction, their “Code” IDE lacks LSP integration, and GNOME or KDE apps look out of place, and it’s impossible to upgrade to new releases. I wouldn’t recommend it anymore, but I hope that they will find their way back up again.

I highly recommend LWN.net.

GNOME. I currently use it without any extensions, but sometimes use “Blur my shell” for the visual effect.

GNOME “just works” and looks extremely polished and consistent. It gives the application the maximum amount of screen real estate. The keyboard shortcuts are great. It’s very power-user friendly IMO.

It’s quite a stretch to call the RHEL-clone companies “the Linux Community”.

RedHat developers created large parts of the Linux software ecosystem and are involved in many upstream projects of RHEL. If anyone is part of the community, it’s them.