WDDM was a huge improvement. UAC was also an improvement against shatter attacks but too aggressive in Vista.

That was another thing Windows 7 "won" on by just being later; by the time it came out many of the major programs that had huge UAC issues were updated and resolved.

I would've loved Vista if it looked like the early Longhorn builds.

Oh yeah that filesystem whatever it was called sounded really revolutionary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS - it's sad, there really hasn't been much done in filesystems, but there's a lot that could be done.

It introduced volume mixer (which stays kinda beloved and sought out even now) (and also WASAPI), search in start (hit start and type, which is now everywhere), snipping tool (which is made even better in windows 11), etc., there's actually a bunch of features there that either get overlooked or misattributed to windows 7, which is kinda interesting. Check out this article about them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista

I remember the start menu search and related search things (both for windows and Mac OS, remember Sherlock?) being so absolutely dog slow and even worse after upgrade/fresh install.

That all went away as SSDs came on the market, but it was a noticeable "downgrade" from teh snappy.