I didn’t think they expected people to actually use it

I think there was a combination of what’s the point just make a better one (paint 3D), move fast and break things (onenote win 10, not going back and making the original better), real fear of if it’s not broken don’t fix it, the rest of windows code being a complete mess, a decade worth of updates to legacy ui components and frameworks starting with windows 8 finally passing triage, and dedicated ui teams like the one lead by Jen Gentleman arguing internally for not sexy projects that match or improve how people actually use the OS.

Stuff like the windows terminal and vscode must have been pretty humbling for internal teams working on monolith legacy projects like visual studio which all professional developers were assumed to graduate to eventually. It’s been interesting times