I can appreciate what you’re saying, but it’s a terrible idea to force a tablet paradigm in non-touch screen scenarios. 8 would have been fine if you could choose your start bar. Don’t say this wasn’t possible, because there was third-party software to make that happen.
I never said it was impossible to keep the old style. Though I do refuse that the start page is only useful to touchscreens. I would have preferred a bit more options than just large or small squares, but it still was a nice way to keep shortcuts close at hand without having them on the desktop. Bringing the shortcut screen over top of everything is much more useful than keeping the shortcuts at the bottom, on the desktop.
Frankly, I found it ridiculous that the start page got so much hate while stuff like bing searches being forced into the local machine search gets no reaction.
Ever tried to use all the hidden features on the sides and corners? Absolute nightmare with a mouse, fairly reasonable with touch. The UX was very dependent on the hardware being used.
And I hate the bing search bar, too, don’t worry. Never used Cortana, occasionally use the search at the bottom of the screen, only select from installed apps or documents. I already know how to use a web browser, thanks, and they all let me choose my search engine, too.
