It was only intended to solve one of the problems, as the other 'problem' is exactly what removing the names would seek to address: a person's authority/history influencing the weight of their comments within a thread. It'd really benefit people who've earned a negative following, but I don't see such a mob mentality on here as opposed to certain aggregators in which biases become apparent in just a few threads.
Nerd Tree is indeed a good one, and I'll add to this vimfs, which isn't a Vim plugin but rather a CLI file system browser with Vim bindings. I hardly ever actually browse my file system (zfs, grep, and locate do all of the work for me), so I'm not sure how much mileage one can get out of this (especially compared to something like Midnight Commander).