Re: 'cause more damage to your brand'
"I definitely agree with you about Windows 10 because the UI is shit. Nowhere near as shit as Win 8. Not as shit as Vista. But far shittier than Win 7 (or even XP)."
To me, the Windows 10 UI is the worst MS has ever come up with. Win 8.1 is pretty appalling out of the box, but it can be fixed, for the most part. The entire "app" portion of Windows 8.1 can be uninstalled, ripped out by means of aftermarket tools, blocked, and ignored, with the Win32 half still intact. You can't do that in 10, as Microsoft removed so much functionality from the Control Panel that you can't get by without Settings anymore. A lot of the system dialogs that used to fall under Control Panel (even if you got to them without opening the control panel) are now in Settings. You can't escape the ugly, idiotic UWP styling that has infected Windows 10, and before they've even finished migrating to that, they've started on a third "design language" in the same OS.
Vista was okay, UI wise. It wasn't as good as XP or Win 2k, which to me are the gold standard of UI design, but Vista was still pretty usable with some tweaking. Vista's problems didn't stem from its UI, which is nearly identical to that of Windows 7, and its very real performance and stability issues were corrected in time. By the time it passed out of extended support, it had been a decent OS for some time, though its name was hopelessly tarnished by then.
Windows 10 is far worse than either 8.x or Vista, as I see it. Windows 8's issues were and are still removable, and what lies underneath is a stable and competent desktop OS. I'm a purist when it comes to UIs, but I chose to upgrade from 7 to 8.1 (suitably modified) about a year ago. Vista's issues were a function of it being rushed to market before it was ready (it was already massively overdue) and MS giving in to Intel regarding the "Vista capable" nonsense, both of which faded in time. Windows 10's flaws are designed in, and they cannot easily be removed. Even if you do manage to do it, the insane update schedule means that even if you manage to dig the flaws out, they'll just be put right back in within a few months, and the means you used to de-stupidize it may not work after that. A Windows 10 installation that may or may not be de-stupidizable is a no-go.