[millstone]

That damn Windows key drives me nuts - press it accidentally during a game and it kicks you out!

Anyways my usual way of going to the desktop is to just command-tab to Finder, and then command N to create a new Finder window, or any of the shortcuts in the Go menu.

Nobody is claiming that the Mac UI is perfect, but it's been way more stable and unified than Windows. Of course there was Windows 8, but even Windows 10 still has things like both the new Settings and old Control Panel, and the old start menu next to the god-awful, ad-ridden Live Tiles. I recently tried to enable automatic login on my Windows 10 laptop and was told to run "netplwiz" in the Run dialog command line. It's a mess.