Alternatives to cd/ls for command line navigation?

Midnight Commander (mc) is one such tool that I'm aware of.

I suggest you to look at:

• readline setting completion-ignore-case (Off)

  If set to On, readline performs filename matching and completion in a case-insensitive fashion.

• shopt -s autocd

  If set, a command name that is the name of a directory is executed as if it were the argument to the cd command. This option is only used by interactive shells.

• shopt -s globstar

  This example will recursively find all csproj files in the current directory and subdirectories:

  git commit -m update -- **/*.csproj`
  

• shell options extglob, and nocaseglob

  for obvious purposes, see man bash

• the CDPATH variable

  cd [-L|-P] [dir]

    [...] The variable `CDPATH` defines the search path for the 
    directory containing dir. [...] If dir begins with a slash 
    (`/`), then `CDPATH` is not used
  

If you're a vim fan, you might also check out vifm, which "is a ncurses based file manager with vi like keybindings. If you use vi, vifm gives you complete keyboard control over your files without having to learn a new set of commands."