Sure it had issues but at least it wasn't an actively hostile bloated piece of adware it is now.
My favorite in terms of looks and behavior is Windows 2000, and it's still in the top 5 when I think of desktop UIs that don't try to grab the user's attention. It was also much lighter on resources than XP, and didn't have poorly-animated dogs hiding behind the menus.
But oh man, let me tell you, the first time I experienced one of the newer versions restart its graphics driver without losing state was magical. I can't remember how many hours I lost to blue screens with a stack trace deep inside some ATI/nVidia dll, and to this day I can get a kernel panic in Linux if I tickle the GPU the right way, but modern Windows has proper GPU driver isolation and they did it without wrecking performance.
I wish it were somehow possible to run the pre-XP interface on the modern OS.
Ah yes, the grand stability of plugging in the wrong USB accessory into the wrong USB port and the computer crashing. Great times :)
Personally the only thing I can think of is the slightly better calculator.
Windows 2000 was the best version I ever used, though I admit I'd switched to Linux pretty soon after it was released.
So it kind of flip flops. Microsoft makes a bunch of changes that everyone hates. Then they roll back a lot of them in the next OS.
That being said, 11 is shaping up to be a debacle. But don't worry, 12 will drop all the things you hate about 11 but keep things they really wanted to include.
That doesn't really describe Vista to 7. Windows 7 was largely Vista Service Pack 3, with some interface tweaks to give it is own visual marketing identity.
The Kernel Version Numbers are a better hint at what is going on than the marketing releases, or the service packs. Windows 2000 was NT5, XP was NT 5.1 (which was mostly a dos compatibility layer on top of 2000, so it could run consumer games and such.) Vista was NT6, 7 was NT6.1, 8 was NT6.2 8.1 was NT6.3.
Like the reason we don't have a "Windows 9", because programs check for that to see if they're running on Windows 95 or 98 because it uses the 9x kernel.
Vista to 7 was significant. An operating system is more than just the kernel.
What you described was a combination of marketing and a change in behavior. They skipped 7 because it would be confusing for 10 to be NT 7. They skipped 8 for the same reason, and 9 for the reason you described.
Nothing about those choices changes that from 2000 to 8.1 there were only one major kernel build number changes, and it was from XP to Vista. Although unpopular, Vista was the biggest leap between any two versions, and part of its lack of popularity was that it was a breaking change that broke most drivers. It also didn't help that they were certifying underpowered machines as compatible.
The conversation I started was about the frequency of major build number increments, not what number they chose to signify a change.