I'm going to put in another vote for Rox. Look at their site --
http://rox.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/ROX-Filer -- for more information, but the big things I like are that it does a lot of admin tasks for those of us who don't know the command line as well as some others. You can delete whole directories, make symlinks, change permissions, launch xterm (or whichever terminal you like) and when you set the run action on a file type it does whatever you've told it to do. It also has spring-loaded folders, image previews and resizable windows -- or not. And it does all that in nice little windows and very, very quickly and intuitively.
I like to load up and try all the different window managers and desktop environments, and the first thing I do is make sure Rox launches as the default file manager. I also try a lot of distros on my spare machine, and one distro wouldn't compile Rox correctly and that was it for that distro.
Funny thing is, I don't use the pinboards and all that. I use Fluxbox, and find that anything beyond the standard-issue desktop detracts from that clean Fluxbox feel.
Anyway, didn't mean to come off like a fan boy, but you asked what we liked about our choices, and there you are.
Have fun,
joe f.
