Okay, so two most popular choices are of course Qt and GTK+. Both of which have Python bindings. If you don't plan on doing anything too complex there is also a choice of wxWidgets, which is another toolkit with Python bindings.
There are some differences though. GTK3 is used through GObject Introspection model which is kind of confusing if you don't have too much experience with it but let's just say it allows Python programs to use native GTK+ library. Both GTK+ and Qt are just used as simple Python modules.
Personally I skip GUI builders. It sounds counter intuitive but you get to learn toolkit really well and learn how to use it programatically. It also might sound like you have to do extra work, but personally I'd rather type line or two of code than click for 5 minutes setting properties.
GTK+ user interface builder (Glade) creates XML files which you load and "inflate" into real user interface. The trick with using this is having to find a widget you wish to use after inflating UI. I dislike this approach as it adds code in my opinion and just makes a bunch of things hidden. I didn't use Qt builder so I won't comment on that.
Personally I prefer GTK+ and have made complex interfaces with it from Python (see Sunflower file manager). Software I linked was done with PyGTK, and is currently being switched to GTK3 which is much nicer I might add (support for CSS, animations, etc. (also available with Qt)).
It pretty much boils down to what you want to build and which toolkit looks easier to you. All of them are competent and will do what you need. All of them are cross-platform. All of them have good documentation with small exception of wxWidgets where I got lost for some reason. I would advise trying to make a simple window with a button on it with both toolkits and see what suits you better.
Offering of twin panel file managers is quite bleak in Linux world. There are plenty of them, but development has either stopped or going in some direction which doesn't make sense to me. Out of the bunch, Krusader is quite good, but it's based on KDE and requires KDE libs. On Gnome part, there are very little native ones like Gnome Commander, but it looks downright ugly and for a long time they didn't have support for tabs. TuxCommander is based on Kylix project which Borland killed long time ago so its future is not bright. Pretty much Nautilus and any similar form file manager has dual panes, but they are not well integrated or keyboard oriented. Midnight Commander is everything you'd need from a file manager, but it's command line.
You could take a look at DoubleCommander as well, it's good but I didn't like its integration with the system and file association handling.
There's also Sunflower which is something am developing. I don't want to do this whole self-promotion thing, but it's worth a mention since the reason why I started this project is exactly lack of twin panel file managers that work and look good.
Every way I possibly can. You can take a look at Sunflower and other projects of mine on GitHub. Pretty much any work I do it ends up being open source.
Other than developing my own software I report bugs whenever I run into them. Translating software and maintaining knowledge bases is also a great contribution. But there are other ways that also count. Spreading the word and educating people is also a huge contribution.
I use pcmanfm most of the time, but I've been using ranger a bit more lately. Midnight Commander is also nice, and if you want something similar in a GUI, check out Sunflower (another selling point is the built-in terminal emulator) Here they are side-by-side
If am not mistaken issue was in GIO which had a nasty bug. Same thing happened in my program as well. The problem was with even triggering. Mount related events would be fired more than once, so in order to compensate for that I had my program ignore one of the events not knowing I caused the bug in my own program as GIO was not suppose to trigger that one. All in all I had bunch of issues where on some systems I would get duplicate mounts and on others I'd get none. Luckily that issue seems to be going away slowly. Later version didn't have it.
Sunflower File Manager perhaps? This is what it looks like. Also Dolphin can do that, as others have already stated. There are some add-ons for Nautilus, like Nautilus Terminal, and Elementary.