Opened tabs, cant scroll, cant show hidden?

I'm having a possible male-or-break purchase decision problem here.

I have a personal preference of having my tabs open on the left side of the screen. I like to have easy-glance access at all the files I'm currently working on. Tabs along the top are hard to read, scrolling left to right, then down rows as more tabs are opened.

Well it seems with the tabs on the left... I cannot scroll them at all. Once I reach the max number that will fit on my screen... they just stop adding. So then I noticed the 'show hidden tabs' button, which was annoying to use, but it showed the tabs I was looking for.

I tried disabling 'hide extra tabs' thinking it would just let me scroll the tabs. Nope. They just were not there. So then I went to turn it back on... better than nothing... but it's now grayed out and I can't even turn that on.

Now I have open tabs I can't see or access.

Why can't I scroll the tab list? Why does there have to be a special 'show hidden' button? I really like having my frequently used files on the left. None of the other views are appropriate... The Explorer shows a ton of extra garbage I have no interest in - I dont want space wasted by a directory tree opening up 4 levels to find my script. The favorites list is a marginal second... but its cluttered with extra garbage I don't want to see like the path next to the filenames.

How do I keep a simple list of all recently opened files to the left, uncluttered by wasted whitespace or extra path info, which I can scroll?