I’m not looking at it through a modern lense. It was very insecure at the time, too. I worked in a PC repair shop and at the time that business was a money printer in terms of getting rid of endless malware.

Although yes, the predecessors were worse.

They did, it was called “Windows 8” and nobody liked it.

I would not consider Win8 a “refinement” of Win7 lol, they changed the entire UX.