Note: windows programmer for 19 years now. Only because of the cash.
The disadvantage of NTFS which you point out, isn't because of a fuckup. It's not designed for your use case. You might even find Microsoft telling you that themselves here :- https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Cc938932.aspx
As to your point about productivity, I can't comment without knowing specifics. As a primarily C++ programmer, I haven't run into any Windows showstoppers that prevented me from shipping. I have run into showstoppers with their dev tools, but I see them as separate from the OS.
It should handle general scenarios consistently. We've had a few minor versions of NTFS and now ReFS. ReFS should solve this but it doesn't as it's a copy and paste of the NTFS code initially rather than a complete reengineering effort.
Note: windows programmer for 19 years now. Only because of the cash.
The mantra among the consults I've met in the UK is if you're charging by the hour, do it in .Net on Windows. If you're charging a fixed rate, use Linux and Python.
I'm not suggesting there is anything better for an end user but I'm pointing out that it doesn't work well enough.
I still use it however and have a fondness. The accumulated knowledge of fixes is incredibly valuable.
In fact the majority of Windows networks both corporate and small business I can safely say that it barely works and is usually a mismanaged unpatched mess or filled with crapware.
You literally cannot manage SSO, patching, and config management on a non-Windows environment for more than a few hundred machine without the right tools. Shell scripts and Chef aren't going to cut it when you have 20,000 laptops to take care of.
One of our enterprise clients has just bought 500 Chromebooks and we integrated OpenID in our application and no one has to deal with AD, SSO is sorted and zero management overhead. I really like this solution. If someone could build a standalone product with equal quality it would destroy Microsoft overnight. Their ops team is 4 people and two of them are network people to keep the pipes (and APs) working.
And of course there is FreeIPA and PolicyKit as a contender but that's not really there yet.
To be fair they are financial point of sale machines so it's all process driven and they're not general purpose computers.
Haven't tested ext4 and ntfs drivers directly against each other, but an useful trick if you ever need to copy millions of small files from NTFS is to mount it on Linux because Linux driver can work with it way way faster than Windows one.