[charles_f]

This! Oh, this! And look at the size as well. A fresh install of 11 is over 10gb.

It's something of a Parkinson's law of optimization. The more computing power there is, the more clutter and less optimization will be had until we fill the computing power. When your hardware is a big limiting factor, performance becomes a primary concern.

I think there is also something to be said about the size of the project. Win98 was in the hundreds, 11 is in the thousands. I have found much harder to get the fundamentals right on a larger project than a smaller one. Responsibility is diluted, architecture creates more seams and redundancies, and coordinating people is more complex. On top of that, slap a product culture that favors form over function, and cramming in the largest feature list possible, and you've got yourself a modern OS.