Okay, well I still think it's really weird, even if there's nothing to do about it but grumble. ;-)
I think the file chooser is weird too. Bookmarks are the redeeming feature for me (once type ahead find is fixed that is, and knowing about Ctrl+L to get the Location dialog helps too). It is unfortunate that it managed to be good in ways so completely opposite to what the old version was good at. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
It has been discussed to death and people are pretty jaded about it and as a result it is difficult to get changes made to it but there are a few outstanding bugs and the abscense of type-ahead find in the intial version of the New File Chooser was considered a big glaring ommission. The amount of modifications various programs have made to the file chooser is not a good sign either, one would hope that the stock file chooser would cover most bases and discourage developers from adding things in an inconsistant manner but hopefully things will continue to be improved and the clean API underneath keeps things all a lot more managable.
I jokingly suggest it was a conspiracy by anti-filechooser plotters so that we would revolt and kill off the file chooser entirely and use other methods (file managers, drag and drop, etc) instead. It isn't really a joke though.
- Alan H.