Honestly I would just be happy with the start menu pins not looking like crap. Give a little more leeway on how we can customize it and I would use that instead of my desktop for quick reference things. But the different size of icons is useless when all the icons look crappy or are too small for the size, and worse when I do take the time to download an icon myself, it ends up forgetting/missing the icon now looking worse than before.

Second idea: I want to store desktop icons in expandable groups much like how a smartphone does.

But I'm not confident I will like the changes they make, most people won't since most would just hope to go back to the look and feel of windows 7 or before.