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All participants were looking for a project file when they wanted to open a project. Some of them finally opened the project but they didn't select the project folder directly. They went into the project folder and selected nothing - looks like FileChooser misbehavior.
One simple change that would probably help a little: change dialog title "Open Project" to e.g. "Open Main Project Folder", and change button text from "Open" to e.g. "Select Project Folder". It does somehow look like poor built-in behavior of JFileChooser. Ideally it would let you have two buttons, "Select" and "Enter", and only enable "Select" when appropriate. Note that you can set a project folder to be non-traversable in the chooser... but only if you know that it has no projects in subfolders. Unfortunately you cannot quickly determine that it has none, unless the project is really small.
May be possible to provide a fake "project file", like "<<SELECT>>", that the user can double-click. Essentially a workaround for JFileChooser's weirdness.
*** Issue 42542 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
There are currently no plans for this feature. It also behaves better with current usage of dirchooser component for selecting a project.
NetBeans.org Migration: changing resolution from LATER to WONTFIX