In the days when I used VMS it was common for applications to be tied into the hardware. Therefore you only really ran a fairly bespoke set of applications that were specific to your business. Therefore it is never possible to eulogise fully about the cool wonders of VAX VMS as everything was domain specific.

I worked in remote sensing at a time when UNIX workstations were taking over the show. Again applications were tied into the hardware so if you needed an SGI for your code, that was what you had and again it was hard to fully explain the merits of a given platform in a way that makes sense to a Windows user.