As maligned as it was... I think Vista was actually servicable if all the extra visual effects and UAC stuff was turned off. It ended up looking more like a plainly styled XP desktop and ran moderately well on laptops just for a win32 C development machine (emacs, gcc/msvc cl.exe). I had this setup for windows builds, with a Linux desktop as my main machine.

At least back then more of the original engineering talent that Microsoft had was still around, and you would even run into them on irc from time to time. 20 years on, I suspect a lot of the foundational personalities that drove engineering decisions have since retired or been made redundant, and that reflects the weird UI fracturing and endless regressions. I doubt they can recover at this point.