However, the tiles largely were duplicative of... just having a desktop shortcut (if you don't want a desktop shortcut, just being in the start menu is good enough).
Add the fact that Microsoft never really fully backed off pinning things like Candy Crush to this even for domain account users, and I won't really miss it much.
Live Tiles at their best made the Notification Center redundant. Have all your notifications in the "same place" every time and at-a-glance easy to read.
> Vista's Gadgets were nicer because you didn't have to open the Start Menu to see the weather.
Windows 8 had the right idea in making the Start Screen the default and making the Win32 Desktop "inside it" rather than the other way around. There just wasn't enough courage to let Windows continue to innovate after they lost the initial PR war. (Charms were a really good idea, the execution just needed cleanup. A tiling window manager by default was a really good idea, but they needed to sell the execution by better bringing Win32 applications into that world/window manager without the bulk of the rest of the desktop having to hobble along.)