Hi,
great that it is not me and that I am not alone
And a slight addition to your post:
The Directory Browser window works as expected (no restrictions on navigation, / and .. being available etc.) as soon as your setwd() is /anywhere/ outside of $HOME.
So the feature request would be to drop the navigation restrictions (intended to be simplifications so users don't get lost in the filesysten ?!) regardless in what directory you are.
I find this a tad annoying myself. As best I can tell, there is no direct way to get out of the directory tree rooted at $HOME. The following is a somewhat clunky workaround. In the console window, execute setwd("/opt") or setwd("/opt/src"), then in the viewer window click the "More" menu and select "Go to working directory". I'm not sure that's any better than the symlink approach.