Maybe cause you had no choice for 6 years? Initially XP was also just a buggy mess it took a few releases to fix it.
Agreed, but it excelled in compatibilty, it was needed that time.
Vista actually wasn't that bad, people disliked it because it was a big departure from XP and yet they loved 7 which was the same OS with a bit of polish?
Vista was an ambitious project. Microsoft has never succeed in ambitious projects, the next version was always stripped down (Win7 and XP on example). However unlike the XP, Win 7 has inherited many architectural innovations of Vista like a new device driver model or GDI. UAC was a big things, as user didn't need to run Win 7 on restricted account anymore. For street folks they added a Wizard based Control Panel, Aero theme using modern GUI acceleration engine and for extreme fans some fancy background pictures and called it an Windows 7 Ultimate, people liked it.
