We don’t talk about Window Me

Actually, I used Vista myself for around a year, and for me subjectively it was okay. I later upgraded that installation to 7 and used it several more years on the same hardware.

Pretty much what I have been saying.

Windows 7 was in many aspects Vista SE, they just had to give it a new name because Vista was so „tainted“.

I mean it even reported as Windows NT 6.1 (Vista was 6.0)

Vista had two major problems: Microsoft understated its minimum requirements and allowed it to be shipped preinstalled on machines that were far short of what it actually required, and UAC was specifically designed to make poorly behaved software unpleasant to use, which was a major problem when every Windows program was poorly behaved.

The first could have been easily avoided, but I genuinely don't know how MS could have avoided burning a version on UAC. Maybe if they had shipped it in a service pack first so that XP SP4 was the thing that got a miserable reputation? That clearly wasn't a reasonable option after the Longhorn disaster, though.

There were also a lot of small problems that got fixed on the way to Windows 7. 7 did feel a lot like Vista SP2 with some visual tweaks, but it would have been a really impressive SP.