So, I had been following this thread because this had seemed odd/confusing/wrong to me, too. But I just looked at it again, and I think I understand the behavior (I'm on macOS Sierra 10.12.1).
In List View, while a folder that one has single-clicked on, or otherwise navigated to so that it is highlighted, is selected, it is not the current folder. You can see this if you look at the window title - it will show the name of the current folder, not the selected folder (though, interestingly, the path bar at the bottom (if you have that option turned on) will show the path all the way to the selected folder).
If you want to create a subfolder in that selected folder, you can simply double-click the folder or press command-down arrow, which will make that folder the current folder. And then, when you create your subfolder, it will be created right where you want it to.
Also, perhaps this is because the thread began with a different version of macOS than I'm using, but I never found creating a new folder to simply put it in the root folder - I have always found it to be created in whichever folder Finder considers to be the current folder (which is only the root folder if you've just opened the Finder window and you have Finder's default location set to the root folder or have otherwise selected the root folder).
The upshot, for me at least, is that while the behavior noted by the OP would be nice to have, now that I understand that I can simply double-click or command-down arrow to make that folder the current folder, and then create my subfolder right there, this actually doesn't seem to be such a big deal. But I would argue that the claim as indicated in the original post's title, "Finder quirk: Can not create New Folder in current folder in List View", is not correct - it fails to distinguish between a selected folder and the current folder - in my experience, Finder reliably creates new folders in the current folder. The reason that the List View and Column View seem inconsistent is that in List View you need to double-click a folder to make it the current folder, and in Column View a single click on a folder makes it both the selected and the current folder. This discrepancy makes sense given the design of the different views.
tl;dr
It's interesting that when you right-click a folder, there is no "New Folder" option - if there was, then I would expect the behavior that the OP was suggesting should occur. I just booted up a Windows 7 machine I have to see how Windows Explorer works as a point of reference. There is no apples-to-apples comparison there, because Windows does not mix files and folders in a tree view - the most common view that shows the tree view is a pane that displays only the folder hierarchy and a separate pane that shows the files and folders in the currently selected folder in the folder hierarchy pane. But I tried right-clicking a folder in the folder hierarchy which was not the current folder, and it has a "New > Folder" option that will create a new subfolder in that folder without having to make it the active folder, so it has the functionality that the OP and others here have requested.
As to the question of whether this is good UI design, my experience of macOS and its standard/core applications is that they have a mix of well thought out and consistent UI behaviors and unintuitive and inconsistent behaviors, along with a frustrating mix of nice methods to tailor the UI to work the way you want it to right alongside head-shaking gaps in the ability to easily configure behavior (such as easy keyboard shortcuts to do things like navigate the Application and Status menus and call up the context menu for the currently selected item(s), the ability to permanently delete (not send to Trash) files (especially since you cannot atomically delete items that are in the Trash), and the ability to see an application's list of open windows in the order opened rather than alphabetical order). I didn't find the behavior at issue here to be intuitive, and I don't know whether it's consistent with other parts of the GUI, but in the big scheme of things, this actually seems pretty minor, since it's very easy to simply make the selected folder the current folder. Maybe there's a use case I'm missing, and I agree it's a feature that would be nice to have, but this doesn't seem to be such a big deal given that there's an easy keyboard shortcut to enter the selected folder.