Am I the only person who thinks the lack of a start button and a 'traditional desktop' are non issues? The lack of a start button/desktop is not a usability issue in and of itself - it's everything else that makes it such a nightmare.
Tell that to non-technical users who have trouble remembering to use the start button when it's staring them in the face, they need that visual cue at the very least.
What I meant was that the problem isn't that there's no `start` menu - it's that there's no consistent, intuitive, and quick way to access any program (along with having to switch UI's between desktop and metro, and a lot of other things) which are problems that the start menu originally solved.
Which is exactly why the damn thing was useless to begin with.