In a nutshell, yes, that's what avast! team has been working on for a while. Honeypot and behavior based ransomware detection, as well as generic whitelist based protection of user data folders.
RansomFree is not bad. I mean, it's free so you can't really go wrong. And even though it has virtually no interface, it doesn't really need one to be honest. It's just there and it works. It'll be a bit redundant when avast! gets all the anti-ransomware goodies, but until then, why not. Though, release of Behavior Shield will be a huge asset for avast! already.