I don't remember anyone being excited for a version of Windows since 7. 8 and 8.1 were universally hated, a lot of people clung to 7 until they absolutely had to upgrade to 10, and now they're clinging to 10 as long as they can. I seriously doubt there's an upcoming release of Windows people will genuinely like and want, because there's no money in doing that.
Yeah, but even before that...people were only excited about 7 because of how much of a dumpster fire Vista was. And prior to XP (which Vista replaced), most people didn't care about OS versions at all.
Win10 with Classic Shell is good enough for me..... Until I have to dig into the control panel and dick around with any network settings harder than "hurrr durrr SSID and password goes here". Luckily Simple IP Config does all the heavy lifting for me on that front.
But hey, having to use third party utilities to make my OS usable is just The Microsoft Way at this point.
I have way less patience for it than you do; I bailed out a few weeks into owning a Windows 8.1 laptop. I've been a full time Linux user for 10 years now.
I wonder if no one in the head of such a big company wonders if the fact that an increasing amount of people not wanting to move to their newer versions means that they're maybe, you know, just maybe, doing something that people don't want?
Yeah, it definitely has the Star Trek movie curse.
Each only in comparison to its predecessor, though. I still think Windows 7 was the last version to get out of its users' way and just let them use their computer; everything since then has been worse than 7 in some subtle way.