> dired gets some hate, I think because it creates a lot of buffers and they tend to stick around, but it's never bothered me.

There's a variable in recent versions of emacs that deals with that

  dired-kill-when-opening-new-dired-buffer

I'm glad it's a switch, though. I set it to true, but I can see someone being used to the dired command to go to a specific directory, and then manage things with dired-insert-subdir.