Hi Pilou, I decided to check it out to answer my own question - and the answer seems to be that no the new Blender still has one of the world's strangest file open dialogs rather than using the standard one...

It does seem a bit better than the previous version, but still is very strange, for example when you open it up initially keyboard focus does not seem to be set anywhere so you can't just type in the name immediately like you can with the standard dialog, really basic stuff like that.

It is certainly possible to learn how to use it, and it is very powerful, but it is probably the very best example of the opposite of easy to use that is out there.

- Michael