There are some nice improvements since then too, but also a lot of user-hostile functionality. It doesn't seem wort the trade off to me.
Sure, maybe the control panel was "consistent" in 2000 but it was always user-hostile. The settings app, when finished, will be much better for users. And if they keep the Control Panel around for power-users -- all the better.
I appreciate that Microsoft is doing good software engineering here; they aren't trying to replace everything at once but instead moving things over and releasing it to users early and often. This is the right approach. And yes, maybe it will be 5 years before it's consistent and polished but at least it will get there.
We have been promised this since (at least) Longhorn. It's never materialised. I don't see it in my W10 machine (it reports the latest feature update as v1809 2019-06C).
In fact I just tried going to C: and searching for the word "journal". I am greeted with the familiar crawling green progress bar and "Working on it..." which has been there now for a full three minutes without showing me a single result. I'll cancel the search now.
There is so much else that is beyond broken. Layers upon layers of UX to peel back when you try to change something. Start in W10-styled "PC Settings"->"Accounts", end up in WinXP styled lusrmgr.msc to accomplish what I want.
Every time they add a feature, it doesn't get integrated with the old ones, so the old ones just live alongside. It's bloat upon bloat on the back of a snail riding a tortoise.
The MS corporate experience is just as bad. We have multiple coexisting Sharepoint versions, because the porting of workflows from the old one was too much work and too expensive, as they were not internally compatible. The other day, my colleague was trying to open a PowerPoint from a Sharepoint workspace, and was met with the error message
"(Dogfood only) An unexpected error has occured."
Then there is OneDrive, where you can also create shared folders, but they are not the same as Sharepoint. Except if you access them through Explorer, where they look the same. Except that in OneDrive you can create a folder in the root and it syncs, but if you do the same in the Sharepoint it just makes a local folder on your machine without any feesback. If you want to share a OneDrive folder with someone in another org, 95% of the time it fails. For obscure reasons, frequently that the two orgs' sign-on methods clash.
For communication there is Yammer, and Teams, and Skype4Business, and Skype, none of which can cooperate. Oh, and apparently one more called Kaizala. Oh, and there is chat inside all Office documents, which is separate. And if you reply to people's comments in documents, they get email notifications for those. Sometimes you need to use the web app to make teleconferencing work. Other times the web app fails.
You can assign yourself or others tasks in Teams, or in Outlook, or in Planner, or in ToDo, or in a separate Tasks app. None of those work together.
If Douglas Adams were still alive, he'd be paying Microsoft for inspiration for new material.
Also the little things like taking my laptop, plug it into a monitor and Skype is silenced. Popups about blurry fonts. Files that cannot be deleted because they are busy. Slow performance when manipulating many files.
There is no soul, or perhaps that is Conway's law...
