Win7's built in menu search was great. Win8 technically had similar functionality but it was awful for all the reasons you mention (lag, poor search capability) plus it took over your whole screen in a horrible, visually jarring flash making it very unpleasant to use. Win10's is halfway between the two, but close enough to Win7's that I actually use it now instead of just using Launchy and pretending the Windows menu doesn't exist, like I do on Win8.

Edit: While we're talking about laggy keyboard interfaces, AAARGH the Win10 logon screen is awful. You have to hit a key, then wait for the screen to load and be shown on the screen, before you start typing your PIN, or it'll eat the first character of your PIN going from "press any key to log on" to "enter your pin". What the hell is so hard about understanding that keyboard interfaces shouldn't be laggy even if graphics don't quite keep up? Electric typewriters from 1990 got this right!

> having severe lag on the search, and having the top result vary as a function of time (as more search results are found), is horrendous.

There's no reason search has to do this, though. Spotlight (the macOS version of this) is able to find results pretty much instantly, and it doesn't show any results until it's searched everything, so the top result never changes. I really don't understand why Windows hasn't been able to do the same thing (and if anything, the win10 search is worse).

XFCE (arch also) also does this, and I find that it a great experience that whenever a program is installed I can find it immediately in the category that makes sense.

That's exactly the sort of top level I want! I once suggested that GNOME games be broken down into categories but I quickly encountered a bunch of resistance. Granted, I probably wasn't addressing the right people anyway.

> Putting your application inside your company name was (is?) part of the guidelines from Microsoft.

That was part of the Windows 3.1 guidelines. On Windows 95, Microsoft's guidelines specified that your applications were to appear as single icons under the Programs menu. Unfortunately, most almost all developers ignored that and continued doing things the Win3.1 way.

One possible rationale: companies tend to specialize in one specific software domain, so you would end up with your graphic design software under Adobe folder, your Quake games grouped under idSoftware, and your databases grouped under Oracle.