Completely disagree on both counts. The desktop peek feature is gone which I used regularly to look at stats on my desktop widgets. Right clicking the taskbar has removed all the previous options and now only shows settings. I used that to open task manager with 2 clicks and it had a much larger surface area than just the start button. The non-optional grouping is just completely terrible. Not having an option to keep the taskbar on the edges is awful. The start menu has removed all grouping options and is now far less useful than it was. The new quick access bar doesn't show you the volume unless you hover over it
Explorer has completely made the right click useless that had a lot of utilities I used and now it takes 2 clicks to access them. The icons are fine but they removed all customisation like adding images to the icons which I used for improved readability
All this and it's not even consistent. The windows defender screen is still the old one. The eject disk menu is as old as windows 7. The improvements are inconsistent and as a result, extremely ugly to me. Also you can't even see seconds on the time. Basic crap like this is missing. Why...