I gave Thunar a try and really like the look and feel of it and it is a huge improvement. Unfortunately I miss one feature that prevents me from throwing xfe out. The feature I would suggest to be added is a button that allows to open a terminal directly from Thunar which has the current working directory set to the one that is shown in Thunar. It should be very easy to implement and makes doing something from the CLI much easier. The button itself could be put on the Location Selector --> Toolbar Style (together with a shortcut CTRL + T or something).
The default setup includes a custom action "Open Terminal Here". Just right click on an empty area of the main view and select "Open Terminal Here" and a terminal emulator will opened in the currently displayed folder.
Thanks for pointing that out. I completely overlooked that the requested functionality was implemented in that way. It is more flexible in that fashion. As such my request is not valid and the bugreport can be closed.