Windows Phone 8/8.1 and Windows 8/8.1 are different things and on different platforms. The stats apply to the desktop OS, not the phone OS. Even if you wanted to pretend they were the same, the most frequent complaint was I don't want a phone OS on my desktop.

You can still see this in most reviews, too - reviews of Windows 8/8.1 are generally pretty negative, while reviews of WP 8/8.1 on the same site are positive to glowing.

Windows Mobile 10/Windows 10 are the only ones that are nominally the same and still are in fact very different.

Again, if you talked to people that actually picked up and tried (or bought) a Windows Phone, they were almost universally very pleased with the phone UI and OS. The single biggest complaint you will see is about the app selection.

That's not true. I even remember talking to some Nokia guys that expressed how everyone hated WP7 design and how much rather they would have gone with Meego or Android. There were polls at that time where like 7% of people liked WP design. Just because MS spent some money on marketing to get nice reviews doesn't tell much, but if you want to stay in that echo chamber, it's your choice.

And please don't be condescendingly academic about WP/W8 distinction. The "ugliness" of UI people here talk about is present on both platforms and you still have to do some work to hide it on W10 (e.g. manually unpinning tiles from start menu after each upgrade, confusing system settings, disjoint set of options in old vs new UI etc.).

I don't know anything about WP7, except that it was completely different from WP8. Searching for screenshots shows some basic design similarity, but it ultimately looks nothing like the OS I used. It is one of the reasons that the WP platform was floundering, since WP7 apps did not work on WP8. Either way, remembering a poll can be a tricky thing.

> And please don't be condescendingly academic about WP/W8 distinction. The "ugliness" of UI people here talk about is present on both platforms

I googled "Windows Phone 8 review". This is typical of the results I get.

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/windows-phone-8-review/

Windows Phone 8 makes significant changes while remaining true to its core. It's sharp, colorful, clean, and simple, but also hip and a bit exuberant. New features include a surge of NFC actions, greater customization, and a heavy peppering of more-minor additions and adjustments; yet it's the tile-based interface that continues to be the operating system's most distinctive and defining characteristic.

The UI is virtually always called out as great and great looking, even if the reviewer ends up not liking the rest of the package.

I actually liked WP8 once I was allowed to make tiles transparent, and they just partitioned whichever wallpaper I chose with "launcher rectangles". It was a quite cool design actually. But the original tile layout with that disgusting color palette one couldn't change was obviously something that should have been confined to some modern art gallery for the people that could appreciate it, and never tried in mainstream.