By Finder do you mean Spotlight? My gripe with Spotlight is the instability of the pre-selected item after you type a few characters.
On my mac, if I'm trying to go to Finder, I get
cmd+space (Spotlight Search)
f F(inder.app)
i Fi(nd My.app)
n Fin(d My.app)
d Find( My.app)
e Finde(r.app)
so quite often I'll see Finder.app show up as the result, but I've already told my fingers to type the 'ind', so there's a race between "type these keys", "see Finder", "type return", and "see Find My".
what i do at the moment, which is fairly fast, is launch Finder and type the first couple letters of the window i want to switch to—99% hit rate.