I love joe and I use it often, but the one thing that prevents it from being my main editor is the ability to quick-open files without having to know in which directory it is. I don't have an exact process in mind, but can give a couple of examples on how it could work:
1. shortcut to run a third-party program to search files, then open the path returned. That would work great with fzf
2. open the path that is under the cursor, like ^g searches the word under the cursor. That way we can keep a buffer with a list of files of interest our project. This could even be a "smart quick open" that translate . with / for languages that have this type of import statements (python, java)