BTW, I don't use Dolphin regularly since I do most of my file management with bash/coreutils/etc.
that's exactly what I have done all the time, never loved konqueror (as filemanger), krusader oder dolphin very much: yakuake is the ultimate filemanager :) (and it exists in kde3+kde4..)
btw. I think this whole thread has now more or less degraded into a discussion about look&feel/personal preferences which are not really the basic questions about trinity/kde4. basic questions are IMHO things like: - kde3/trinity is undoubtably less ressource hungry than kde4, while not beeing as minimalist as xfce/lxde or whatever 'lightweight' alternative, which lack a complete set of native applications, anyway (same goes for razor-qt). - I can follow martin's arguing kde4 or especially kwin does not depend on akonadi/mysql/nepomuk. theoretically: yes. practically: no. with all that not installed or just disabeled, there is no working kdepim anymore, period.
and oh, not that I would want to call akonadi/nepomuk some sort of evil devil's magic ;-) I can understand the reasons for their development, but their introduction/push onto the users has been a real mess. just read the forums/mailing lists about data loss/duplication/crazy cpu usage etc. I myself remember having prayed after each upgrade if I would still have my addresses afterwards. not even after an upgrade, but sometimes every day after startup. until I gave up on kde4 after 4.5 or so and switched to trinity. no more prayers about pim data, a complete desktop that _just works_ ;-) additionally, valuable applications like quanta, which are still not available for kde4 (and probably never will be). so, I'm just happy and thankful for a working trinity (yes. everything, including the kitchen sink :) on a modern distro (not centos or thelike, whick lacks everything multimedia etc.). maybe kde 4.8 is now an option to consider again, will think about it...
werner