4) The ability to change all the folder icons to blue (as per Mac OS from 8 to the present).
5) Finally, while slower than Explorer, it is just barely fast enough that I don't care too much, and the other advantages win out overall.
3) Most importantly, a pleasantly dense array of preferences for basic interactions. While it doesn't have reconfigurable hotkeys, it does have a lot of other options besides. This reminds me of other Windows utilities like ConEmu in its customisation depth.
2) These "heat marks" that colour things based on their Last Modified time. This is surprisingly effective, acting like a code editor's "recent changed lines" strip for the filesystem. (Presumably systems with integrated backups have a more sophisticated form of this, I wonder…)
I never did say the name of the program I stuck with (it's https://onecommander.com/) and I wanted to list a couple of other things that made me stick with it.
1) A built-in Dark Mode that looks decent. A surprising number of alternative Windows file managers fail at this one.