Earlier quoted context omitted.
It added a lot more stability over win8 and removed a bunch of terrible UX. Additionally it added to a lot of the great ideas of windows 7. I can’t recall any off the top of my head, but I remember trying to do things in 7 and being surprised they weren’t possible. I agree that win8 set a low bar, but so did vista, fact is 7 was much better and 10 follows that same progression.
Still tries to force cortana on me despite my computer not even having a mic. It places ads in the start menu. Heck, the start menu is basically completely useless. I've resorted to relying exclusively on search now, which means my start menu is a mess and if I can't remember the name of the app, I have to resort to using file explorer to attempt to locate it. I still can't for the life of me figure out how to change…
I'm surprised you're even able to make use of the search because that's also horrible and loves to swap out the result you wanted last second so you open up something else random. It's also incredibly slow and tries to hamfist bing search results and stupid suggestions to install apps instead of just searching your computer.
Now I use Everything (voidtools). And I put it as the first pinned item in my taskbar so I can do Win+1 to access it quickly.