I use the Vim file explorer all the time. The only thing I miss is having a multi-column layout when I've got a directory with a lot of files.

A couple additional tips:

1) You can quickly and easily search through the files the same way you would search through code (regex included) with something like:

  /filename

2) You can easily jump into the Vim file explorer without the steps of opening Vim and executing a command:

  ~/vim .

This will simply open vim with the file explorer in the current directory.