I have an immense amount of respect for you and your technical expertise, so I'll leave this is my last post on this topic so I don't seem like I'm badgering you.
I wouldn't worry about that unless you start using an actual live badger.
First, don't you think you're overstating the effort needed to make Windows 8.1 boot directly to the desktop? It, LITERALLY, involves three steps: right click on the task bar, click the navigation tab, then check a box to show the desktop on start or when all apps are closed. Done. From there on out you never have to see tiles or the metro screen again, unless you want to.
First, I didn't say it took an immense amount of effort. I said it was wasted effort, and only possible if your platform is upgraded to 8.1, and you can only do that on your own personal desktop and not anyone else's desktop without your permission. So there's the separate question of how usable Windows 8.x is for your own personal tweaked system, and how usable it is in an environment where the choice is to deploy Windows 7 everywhere or Windows 8 everywhere.
And: its impossible to avoid seeing tiles or the metro screen short of a desktop replacement, because that's what Windows 8.1 replaces the start bar with. You can only avoid seeing it if you don't ever need to start a program ever again that isn't pinned to your task bar.
The second part of your question, for me at least, includes instant start up and shutdown, improved speed all around, incredibly fast search and integration of my windows ID with my Xbox Live ID, hotmail (I know, I know), etc. The ease of upgrading, with the ability to upgrade from the Previous OS (windows 7) to the new one without having to reinstall all of my programs or lose any of my data was also a nice bonus. They also added back an (in my opinion) improved version of the start button, where right clicking gives you MUCH faster access to most of the common things you had to dig to get to before, like Device manager, disk manager, power management, etc.
Windows 8 starts up faster, but that's an improvement in the part of the system that matters least on a regular desktop. It is a huge improvement on laptops and tablets, although Windows 7 starts up pretty fast with SSD drives.
Calling the ability to upgrade from Windows 7 a benefit of Windows 8 is actually backwards: its Windows 7 that can be upgraded to 8, not Windows 8 that's capable of upgrading Windows 7. It was XP that could not be upgraded to 7. If Windows 8 was better than Windows 7 in that regard, it would have been able to do what Win7 could not do: upgrade XP, but of course it can't do that any more than Windows 7 can.
"Integrating" online account information with local account information sounds good on paper. In practice, its what you set up for grandma so they have one less thing to do. A lot of everyone else actually hates this feature, and the fact that it takes several steps once again of wasted effort to work around.
The right-click pseudo-start bar is a welcome addition to Windows 8.1, and I'm sure I'll enjoy using it in Windows 9 or Windows 10, whichever one Microsoft gets right, but its a concession to the fact that those things were so difficult to find, remember, and use in Windows 8. I think its (and this is a general criticism, not one aimed at you specifically) extremely disingenuous for the Windows 8 welcoming committee to sell the story that those features were trivially easy to use, and are now saying that in Windows 8.1 they are even more trivially easy to use than ever before. That's a bandaid for something that is generally broken in Windows 8: most people can't find things without being told where they are.
I will say that since I switched to a Nokia Lumia, I'm seeing why, if I had a Windows tablet as well, I'd REALLY like Microsoft's decision to try and get some uniformity in their OS systems across platforms. That was their long term strategy: to try and make a single Windows system that really feels like it transcends the PC to unify all types of devices.
It has been for many years, and it will be the death of Microsoft if they don't let it go. Microsoft hasn't had a good day in the non-gaming space since the 90s when they first brain-locked into the Windows-everywhere strategy.
Sorry you don't like it, and really, it doesn't matter what OS someone chooses to use. I just think Windows 8 gets a bad wrap. It didn't work with the general public, but I think that was as much the public just not seeing the need yet as it was the actual attempt being an inferior one. They should have made Windows 8's metro menu be the option you enable, instead of the other way around. That alone might have saved it from initial culture shock. Who knows?
If it was actually meant as a genuine usability improvement, that is what they would have done. But it wasn't an attempt to actually give users better tools: it was an attempt, as you referenced above, to try to create a one-size-fits-all OS for PCs, tablets, and mobile devices, and Microsoft thought they had the market power to rewrite the standard for how people use PCs. From a strategic business perspective, Windows 8 was an attempt to reproduce Apple's success with the iPad. Apple created a market segment out of thin air with the iPad, and in the process they set the standard by which all tablet computers would be judged. And they were able to create a whole new UI metaphor that people were willing to adopt quickly. That gave Apple tremendous power over the marketplace. Microsoft attempted to reverse that strategy and take their dominance on the desktop and translate it into a way to penetrate the tablet space: if everyone was using Windows 8 on the desktop, it would make them more likely to want the Metro interface on their tablets than IOS.
The problem for Microsoft is that it doesn't work that way. A lot of people blamed the failure of Windows 8 on factors like the fact that people just don't like new things. But that's absurd. IOS itself proves that is totally false. Moreover, Microsoft has never had the backslash to Windows 8 that they had to previous versions of Windows. People didn't complain wildly when they introduced Windows 95, a radical departure from the Win3 interface. They complained wildly about the features introduced in Vista, but when they were implemented correctly and with an actual eye to usability the complaints about the very same features mostly disappeared in Windows 7. The evidence is that people are willing and able to accept new things if they are genuine improvements, and are equally willing to reject them when they are not.
The proof is how absolutely alone Microsoft was and is in their Windows 8 strategy. Apple uses different interfaces for OSX and IOS, and that differentiation allows each to leverage their platforms in a way users appreciate. Most Android systems have a similar differentiation, with larger systems having a more desktop-looking interface, smaller tablets and phones having a more IOS-looking interface, and Google is working on a different UI again for wearables. Would Microsoft put a charms bar on a watch? Don't answer that; my answer is look at what they did with Windows CE. They would in fact put a charms bar on a watch.
Windows Mobile 7 is actually a pretty good mobile OS. But it took years for them to abandon what they were doing before with Windows Mobile prior to that: prior to that Windows Mobile looked like someone tried to squeeze Windows onto a phone, and it was horrible. I had a Windows mobile phone: settings like muting the phone required going into the control panel and changing a device profile. That's ludicrous.
If Microsoft doesn't learn their lesson soon, Apple and Google will eat them alive. Their primary safe haven was the desktop, and Windows 8 shows they think they can bet all those chips on red over and over again because they will never lose.
Now, all of this is not to say that Windows 8 is irredeemable. Lots of people like it, and in many environments it works well, or at least a lot better. On tablets its not bad. In much simpler work environments its not bad. In non-legacy environments its not bad. If you like it, I have no problem with that. But the people that don't like it aren't just too stupid to figure it out, and there is such a thing as objective UI design, and Windows 8 would fail most industrial UI design classes: that's just a fact. Most importantly, if you're the guy responsible for making a new operating system designed explicitly to be used by the 400 million Windows users out there, there's no question whatsoever that Windows 8 was a giant failure in that regard. The fact that that guy made maybe half those people happy and pissed the rest off when there was absolutely no reason for that (you mentioned it yourself: if Metro was good enough to sell itself, they didn't have to force it on anyone; it could have been a nice optional extra) makes him an complete idiot.
