Compared to Gnome 3/40 or Windows 8 or even Windows 10, Windows Vista was positively sensible. Its problem was hardware requirements that were hard to meet at the time.

By 4.10 or so KDE 4 had matured to KDE 3 level and this hasn't changed with Plasma 5.

And how most drivers needed to be rewritten

Yeah i did. That 'look' makes not much of a difference when you can customize every single aspect of the desktop environment. My desktop looks and functions identically now to the way it looked and functioned in KDE3 and KDE4, apart from some small improvements and changes I've made over the years.

The problem with newer versions of GNOME is, you get what they give you and you better like it cause that's all she wrote.