Object Management

[micheus]

I agree with you about the Combine/Separate operations and I also don't like the way it works. By now, the way things are structured I was not still able to find a way to workaround that (in the times I tried to figured it out).

As an aside, it would also be nice if, when creating folders whilst objects are selected, said objects would be automatically put in the newly created folder.

Nova already explained about the Folders use. So, about this I have to argue that creating a new folder the select objects still remains selected and you can just right-click over the folder and use the option to move those items to it. I don't think that is a big deal.
The automatic move you want would not be what other uses want - I wouldn't. Sometimes we are with some selections and to organize things we decide to create a new folder for that selection as well for other groups we discovered would be useful.

I too was hoping that I could perform actions on folders as a whole, but that didn't seem to be possible.

Yes, it is (at least the basic ones).
We just don't do that "over" the folder name. We need to use the MMB over the icone we want to play with (hide/show,lock/unlock,...). There is only a small issue with this: the object under the mouse will not change the state and you need to use LMB on it again. Check this old gif I did a couple of years (link - that time I didn't pay attention to Information line ):