[WorldMaker]

Beyond nostalgia, I do think the Blades were never quite as fast as people remember them being. They were designed extremely well including some brilliant flashy animations that I think were very cleverly designed to give the illusion of speed and fast movement in just the precise way to build a nostalgia for their "speed" after the fact. I think that's precisely why there are so many conflicting opinions between nostalgia goggles and people that remember real experiences on slow WiFi playing multiplayer Xbox Arcade games from full hard drives while streaming some music from a Windows Media Center somewhere else in the house. There were definitely all sorts of cases when you'd hit slowdowns and hiccups in the Blades UI and the animations just let you down at that point.

(ETA: Also, I think some of people's nostalgia is affected by they may not have even had the full hard drives of games and apps and huge active Xbox Live friend lists and such like that until the NXE or later anyway, which is another interesting bias to consider.)