You may want to take a look at Path Finder though. …
Yes but … I'm looking for a scriptable way to have all my window contents unified. Since Finder won't give me that without GUI scripting, I was thinking to try one of those...
Unfortunately there's nothing out there that will give you a better unified experience than the Finder.
I'm not a big fan of it, and I've tried just about every file manager that's come out for the Mac.
I own copies of Path Finder, ForkLift, Commander One PRO, and DCommander – and have had others in the past.
I have about 90 scripts for the Finder, and most of them have keyboard shortcuts via FastScripts.
I also have 5 Keyboard Maestro macros that do certain sequences more conveniently than AppleScript.
With all of that I've managed to make the Finder more user-friendly to my way of working.
I have NOT managed to intelligently manage Finder views though. The scripts I posted earlier are about as good as it gets. (Bad Apple!)
However.
I've done some research and have found that various people have written libraries in Perl, Python, (and perhaps others) to work directly with .DS_Store files (where Finder-view info is stored).
Here's one example:
As you can see the documentation for this library is poor.
The Perl module may be more complete.
But again the documentation is so-so and lacking useful examples.
(There are 3 decent examples in the module source.)
I have not gone so far as to try implementing any of these – yet.