Windows 7 won't die, still second most popular operating system

Personally, since a major Windows update or two ago I only have one settings panel I actively use that is still a Win32 dialog and not directly in the modern Settings app. That's the Environment Variables dialog, and being a developer/power user control panel I can see how that would be a lower priority to merge to the new Settings. Though it is still interesting to point out that the Environment Variables dialog was improved in Windows 10 over its Windows 7 counterpart.

It shouldn't be surprising to anyone at this point that Microsoft is prioritizing settings updates and merging settings dialogs into the modern app in priority order based on available telemetry of what's most commonly used. It never surprises me that most of the people still complaining that their pet settings that they care about haven't migrated to the modern Settings apps are the same that disable telemetry and complain about it. Microsoft doesn't know you are using that setting often if you aren't giving them the telemetry to understand that, it's pretty simple.

I think my ideal would be for the new settings paradigm developed completely parallel to the classical settings interfaces. I don’t think it’s a good idea to deprecate classic settings, maybe not forever but absolutely not before you have parity.

I would prefer them to try and tackle whole host of issues before unified settings. Transition to a CoW fs (rip refs), separating configuration and state from the registry and more robust display scaling for starters. That said, I think settings fragmentation as-is is needlessly complex. And there have been real improvements in my opinion in some of the new settings ui/ux, for example the new per-application audio I/O control menu. The classic network properties and settings are truly awful, something as simple setting a static IP requires a series of dependant and uncloseable property panes that can’t be used (or even visible in some cases) while you are using a child of the previous pane. It’s been largely unchanged since windows 95, and in the past couple years I’ve liked where they are headed. I think that if they really can achieve their goal of a central, monolithic settings control interface then that would be a real value.

The process to re-approve a machine after a bloody update is painful(to say the least).

Even for something as lousy as a BMS system of a reasonable size (100 bacnet controller) will still take 1 week or more to fully test and approve. Keep in midn that these are machine where the only things that you can plug in are those whitelisted at the end of the test.

Even the approval to replace a keyb+mouse set takes a few days and requires a sys admin to go to site.

Our IT is not purposely keeping a security hole open to boast about uptime. If there was a security impact to our particular configuration/use-case, we'd patch it for sure.