Finder windows in Mavericks sometimes not so accessible...

Hi! I've noticed this ever since updating to Mavericks. Frankly, I'm not really sure what's going on here, so I thought I'd just throw the question out to the awesome AppleVis community ... Some finder windows just isn't quite as easily accessible as in MountainLion. Usually when opening a new finder window, I can go ahead and use the arrow keys right away to navigate the content of folders and files. I use to have finder windows open in column view, cause I find that to be the most intuitive, with using the right arrow to open folders and left to go out to the previous folder level. But in some folders or windows, nothing happens when pressing any of the arrow keys... So I'll then have to interact first with the navigation window, where the files and folders are located. And still then, nothing happens when just hitting the arrow keys, so I'll have to navigate using the VO keys together with the arrow keys. And then, when arrowing around with the VO keys held down, I sometimes come across weird headings that I haven't seen in MountainLion, like "Folders", "Documents", and so on... So it seems to me that there's some strange new view going on here, that I haven't gotten the hang of yet. For instance, if I hit Cmd+N to open a new finder window, every things fine, and I can use the arrow keys as I always have done, to navigate files and folders. So then if I navigate to let's say my downloads folder, I can find all my downloads just by using the up and down arrow keys. But if I hit the Mac global shortcut Cmd+Option+L to open the downloads folder, the window opens in this strange new view, that I haven't yet understood, and I'll have to interact, and after that keep the VO keys down while navigating the content of the folder. And then, again, it seems like the content is grouped under headings, like "Folders" and "Files" etc. What am I missing here? Is there a option to make every finder window open so that I can use the arrow keys alone to navigate, like I'm used to? Maybe it's me who just have a long lasting attack of stupidness here... Lol :) Really confused, cause it works sometimes and not other times. And I have had to quit using the Cmd+Option+L shortcut to open the downloads folder, and instead just navigate to the folder from a new finder window... Any suggestions? Thanks in advance! :)