How can I stop Dopus showing me the last few days as:
yesterday, friday, thursday, and so on. I would rather just have the dates. Is there a way to change this without me having to be a genius with dopus configuration?
You can change that in preferences -> folders -> folder display -> "show name of the day, if the date is within one week" (the last entry can be somewhat differently. I just translated it from the german version).
abr,
Thank you so much!! I've been tolerating that annoyance for years. I never guessed it would be so easy to turn off 
You're welcome. Another nice thing about Opus is, that you almost have a choice.
I just discovered that you can have a line in the folder tree to show the path to the folder you are in, which is pretty good.
Yes, there are a plenty of options, so it's hard to explore them all. Btw. i meant "always have a choice", of course, not "almost".