On the subject of patches, how many people understand the working of nautilus well enough to even attempt it? I dug into the smb:// code for gnome-vfs once, and it was very non-linear. What functions would need work to do get wildcards/filtering to work?
If you've touched gnome-vfs internals I'd think you know enough since you know how vfs enumeration of contents works and you are talking about a filter over that (or in it..)