The OS was good around the 8.0 time frame, reliable and highly usable. Not the whack-a-mole app dance that is iOS, and not the byzantine maze of android. The changes in 8.1 I did not care for, it made things more like iOS / android but at least the OS remained reliable. It seems like MS thought about the phone and what their strengths were, and decided to get rid of them.
I must be the only one that cares about design, because the inconsistencies they introduced in margins, dialogs, style of buttons, etc. in 8.1 really grinded my gears.
Wow. I totally get your point, however it used to be that the OS was simply a platform to USE apps with which you do actual work. We've come a long way to this distorted weird dysfunctional belief ...