Hi, Windows Phone fanboy here. I've posted most of the below before. ;-) The sad truth is, that the new Metro UI introduced with Windows 8 specifically for Phones was pretty efficient and slick. A mid-tier WP phone was running circles around a mid-tier Android phone in 2014 when it comes to smoothness. Then we got another reboot of the whole mobile endeavor with UWP for Windows 10, which was more resource intensive, continuing the megalomaniac idea of having a unified mobile and desktop experience. And I don't think it's impossible to create this somehow. I just think developing a nice Phone UI and forcibly bolting it onto a 30 year old desktop OS that mostly evolved in gentle steps before was... stupid.

Anyways, the ironic thing today is that that whole UI mess Windows is in was caused by something that doesn't even exist anymore. These two disjoint worlds that lead to these jarring moments where you're thrown from that modern flat-clearly-coming-from-a-mobile-design-paradigm settings window into another dialog coming straight from the 90s. The new one wouldn't exist without Microsoft's botched attempt of re-entering the phone market! Without WP, we could have simply gotten more thought-out iterations and improvements to the plain old Windows GUI, with a desktop-centric approach, but more modern design philosophies. But now we have a mobile-first UI that is being spent lots of effort on to make it usable on a desktop OS.

And sure, I'm over-dramatizing a bit here. We got more touchscreens, convertibles, yada-yada that still benefit from these changes. But it was approached in a really twisted, stupid way, and I still don't know anyone who prefers UWP apps. Especially my old folks are rather confused by this and would prefer Windows still looked like XP or 7. Younger people might not care so much but spend all of their time in a browser anyways if they don't use their phones. Everyone else is a professional, and professional software doesn't exist as UWP apps.