Honestly, I even miss the charms bar/gesture; it was easy to make a larg general swipe and then choose "shutdown" to shutdown.
>forced updates
can be turned off with a few clicks, no external tool required, no command line anything. its just shy hard enough that people who should not do it wont accidentally figure out how. If you dont know how you know what to google for, if not you are one of thous people who should not turn updates off.
>telemetry
can be turned off mostly but not so easy. however its an essential part of how a modern OS is maintained people dont like it and I get why but fixing up bugs from just user bug reports is simply not feasible anymore.
>paid-for calculator
no clue what that means
>online accounts needed for local logins
simply not true. Ive used every windows from 95 to 11 and not one needes an online account. to this day I dont have one and beside the obviously cloud based apps like onedrive I can use everything just fine.
>literally zero improvements to day-to-day use vs 8.1.
pointless statement as it depend on use-case. plenty people only use office and a browser sure the OS updates have no use for them.
One thing missing in this discussion is DirectX. Windows 10 launched with a new version and tried to market itself as a gaming platform. People playing AAA games on PC is a sizeable market and this would've been a significant everyday upgrade for them.
Windows 10 was a clusterfuck, from forced updates bricking machines to telemetry shoveled down everyone's throat to paid-for calculator to online accounts needed for local logins and all the way to its inbred UI. Total cluster, literally zero improvements to day-to-day use vs 8.1.