Hard links and directory junctions (the sort of directory symlinks that existed before Vista) never required administrative privileges.

> While bsdlove's comment wasn't that great, were not most Windows users not using NT until Win2k, and even then, sym & hard links weren't useful, since you needed (and continue to need¹) administrative privileges to create them?

To be fair it was first with Vista that Microsoft tried to seriously lock users down and keep administrative privileges far away for the common user.

I'm pretty sure most Windows 2000-users had admin rights. This was not the reason symlinks was not adopted.

Developer mode is just a place for MS to stash new beta features so they can be tried out for a longer period of time than Insider Rings are allowed. I'm willing to bet it'll be default in another release or two w/out dev mode.