.... what? Sorry but... if that's really the only other way you see to reach Applications, you really suck at setting up your environment to work for you.
Have your Application folder pinned in the dock for any Application that you don't know by heart, which means that you don't use them often.
For everything else you know by heart, Cmd + Space + Type the start of the name of an App then press Enter. Or get Alfred which does something similar but in a fancier and more specialized way.
For anything that you use often, just keep it pinned in the Dock. This has the added benefit that the icon will always be at the same location in the dock so you will never have to search for it when switching to that App. You will know intuitively where it is and never give it a single thought. I keep the same icons pinned in the same order on my Mac and gaming PC.
And do yourself a favor, get Hyperdock. No looking for the right window ever again (which is why I hate Exposé).
Regardless of what
I think of LaunchPad, in my opinion you utterly fail to make your argument against it. 3rd party Apps are no argument at all. This is about OSX's own features so "Alfred" is moot.
Typing part of a name is not what I'd call a good "GUI" feature and it involves many key presses and remember the App's name. This sounds like a MS-Dos type solution and is not Mac-Like at all. Busted.
The Dock has very limited space for direct Apps and so this does little to help organize things for quick access. Yes, you can pin Applications to the dock and I do both of these. However, a LARGE number of Apps is still clunky as hell this way as looking through a huge list of Apps is not "fast" at all if you cannot remember the name of the App.
I see two solutions here, one with LaunchPad and one without but BOTH involve sorting apps by FUNCTION. I used the same method on Windows and its Start Menu which becomes cluttered when you get too many programs also.
Thus, you would create sub-folders in Applications based on usage/type of program. Games would go in a Games folder, Text/Word apps in a Text folder, Video editing, Video Players, Archivers, etc. etc. (you can then also pin the sub-category folders to the dock for quick access to much shorter lists of applications)
You can do the same thing with LaunchPad and this is common on iOS devices as well. Create category folders and put the apps in their own category. Click or Swipe and its easy to find. You can even do this as an alternative to setting up sub-folders for Applications. I put Games in their own Sub-folder, but leave most other things in Applications. However, categorized Launchpad by type and moved all the icons into each folder and so I can search Applications for something alphabetically and Launchpad by function. Even with over 250 Applications, I can fit them all onto one screen in Launchpad by organizing them. Launchpad turned out to be more useful than I first thought (i.e. an unorganized mess to locate apps over several pages that don't even alphabetize; but they organize into subject folders really well).
I would like the ability to manually map that change. If I just start driving, for all I know once I get through PA it will try to shoot me back over to NJ or something. Maps can be pretty stubborn about its route and it's kind of hard to see what it's thinking while I'm driving.
