I think when it comes to this it is best to remember the home computing landscape of the time, and the most important part: DRAM prices.
They were absurdly high and NT4/2000 required more of it.
My assumption is Microsoft would have made the NT4/2000 jump much quicker if DRAM prices were driven in a downward direction.
PC gaming was, back then, still very DOS-centric. It wasn’t until the late 90s that games started to target Windows. And even then, people still had older games they wanted supported.
To add a third prong: hardware support was a big issue too as it is for any consumer OS, with legacy hardware being an issue just as it can be today if not more so. This hit both NT and OS/2 similarly.
I could then initialise the card in DOS and reboot into NT without it being reset and losing settings. Then some sketchy modified driver was able to use it.
I asked him why I should pick OS/2 over NT and his response was "honestly, if you can afford it, NT is better"
At the time, we were selling OS/2 for $99 and NT for $499 IIRC. (And I was able to use a store copy of both to take home and use, which was awesome)
OS/2s interface was better IMO.
Plus Windows ME wasn’t exactly nimble either. People talk about the disaster that was Vista and Windows 8 but ME was a thousand times worse. Thank god Windows 2000 was an option.
Also, at the time NT was still somewhat limited in official settings to pretty much rare more expensive places and engineering systems, with typical business user keeping to Windows 98 on "client" and NT Server domain controllers or completely different vendors, at least outside big corporations with fat chequebooks. Active Directory started changing it a lot faster, the benefits wer great and 2000 having hotplug et al was great improvement, but it took until XP for the typical office computer to really run on NT in my experience.
I think the main difference is really just that XP had a “Home” edition that came preinstalled on home PCs.
There’s no reason Microsoft couldn’t do that with 2000, and in fact I read that some stores did stock Windows 2000 instead of Windows Me (though this wasn’t something I personally witnessed).
From what I recall, an important point for releasing ME at all was that compatibility (both in applications and drivers) was not yet ready at the time of NT 5.0 going gold, leading to a stopgap solution being deployed.
I guess it depends on the office though. At risk of stating the obvious: Different organisations will do things differently.
The organizations that really needed NT for various reasons (engineering software, SMP, higher security settings, etc.) did move as early as NT4, indeed. Also, non-trivial amount of Alpha workstations with NT4 (as well as Pentium Pro ones)
But yeah, what a turd of a system.