But I'd also like us to discover more, to hopefully make the desktop better. The way to do that however, is not by forcing users to try whatever the hot new thing is. The old and known good needs to remain a viable option.
My opinion of XP is a little more mixed than yours.
XP was great, but I maintain that 7 is actually the high water mark for Windows' usability. There's a lot of stuff you take for granted nowadays that XP never had.
Dragging a window to the side of the screen to snap it to one half of the screen. You probably do that a lot now, but XP doesn't do that.
XP has no search function in the Start menu. Hell, I don't recall Vista having that, either.
Explorer (the file browser, not the browser browser) in XP is far more simplistic than you remember it. Again, limitations mostly come down to search and quality-of-life stuff that we now take for granted.
Snipping tool. Being able to smack Print Screen and quickly crop and annotate a screenshot is awesome. XP doesn't do that OOTB. Greenshot really was the freeware gem you remember it being, to be fair.
XP does get a lot of things right. Highly legible and consistent UI elements with clear visual feedback and color coding. Control Panel being a unified portal for all Windows settings. Fast user switching was a big innovation vs previous Windows versions. No ads (besides mostly benign MSN promos), no online accounts, no cloudshit.
I encourage anyone reading this to go grab an old laptop and an XP Pro CD-ROM. Try using XP the way we used it in its own time, on era-appropriate hardware. In some ways it's as great as you remember it. In other ways, it probably isn't.
Vista definitely had that out of the box; Windows 7 perfected the search functionality - specifically it ended up performing faster than Vista. then windows 8 had to ruin it, and windows 10 never recovered - MS seemingly forgot what a good local search experience was after that.
If you ask me, MS seemingly forgot what a good experience for anything was after Windows 7.