I tried XYplorer a while back, liked it very much, and almost paid for it before settling for Directory Opus. (My apologies if I sounded not too enthusiastic for DOpus. It's great, in fact, but it's a little too pricey for me -- especially considering cost of upgrades in the future.)
XYplorer had almost everything I wanted except one minor flaw, but that minor flaw killed the deal for me.
No, it's not the dual-pane thing everyone talks about. It's the lack of unicode support. I've endured the inconvenience of working with several East Asian languages in an ASCII-centric environment for 20+ years and I cope and manage as best as I can. But in this day and age, a file manager that can't handle unicode file/path names properly is simply unacceptable to me, no matter how great it otherwise is. (It's the same reason why I've never tried Total Commander, another highly respected FM.)
I almost took the plunge for the $30 lifetime license a few weeks back before Don raised the price. Didn't do it for I wasn't sure when, if ever, Don was going to solve the issue. The new UDC thing and other improvements all look very promising, but I can't help but think that unicode support really isn't high on the to-do list.