I have learned to love rclone for some scenarios (rather than using for example the OneDrive client) and I think direct support of rclone (or even integration?) would be awesome, especially for temporarily mapping cloud to drives.
Sounds like it mounts as a normal filesystem with a drive letter, so it should already work with Opus and everything else.
Toolbar buttons to run the mounting command would be easy enough, but the details would depend on exactly what you wanted to do.
Sure, you could do a lot with scripting to rclone, but from a marketing side, just think of Directory Opus being a file manager with access to all the major cloud filesystems out of the box? Like you can do FTP right now? So you would not HAVE to map, you can just use it like the current FTP functionality?
And running Opus Sync against cloud filespaces would be a killer app for me.
(And you could sell rclone integration as an extra feature like you do with FTP today).
In terms of direct support, without having to use their software to map things, there are a few issues that stop us doing that:
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There are about 1,000 different cloud vendors these days, all using different protocols, and every person has their favourite. Adding custom, direct support for all of them just isn't realistic.
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The popular ones all already have Windows clients which make them work with Opus. We've added support for those where it makes sense (e.g. to display additional Availability columns and change how/when thumbnails are requested, and so on). We can't add much value here, other than "not having to install one extra piece of software", but that software is probably going to be installed by most people who use those services anyway, and that software makes them work with everything, not just Opus.
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If we write our own support for their protocols, we'll end up spending too much time chasing problems and bugs due to changes on their side. And they are under no obligation to help us, to avoid breaking things for us, or warn us when things will change, or even to continue allowing third party access at all. We already run into this with things like Flickr. It's better to let companies write their own official clients for their protocols/servers, and then gain support through those.
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If they were interested in supporting a simple (S)FTP-like interface for direct access, they'd probably already have implemented support for SFTP itself on their servers. If all you want is something like (S)FTP then a cloud storage solution is overkill and an actual (S)FTP server makes more sense, too.
If you feel those things aren't true and that it would be worth the time to implement, Opus has a VFS plugin API which allows you to write this feature if you really want it. It's not something we plan to do ourselves, though.
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Point taken.