> But among the endless blizzard of these, this is an odd one to make your last stand for. More to the point, onto
For me it's personally not, it's mostly about how slow and bloated W11 feels. On my 9800X3D (an insanely powerful and fast chip!), explorer is slower than it was in the windows 95 days on the i386 of yore. They've converted half of everything in Windows into a web view and you can feel it, don't even get me started on the adware.
> All the examples you listed are much more significant IMO than whether the taskbar goes to the bottom or top of the screen. I imagine that MS would be less likely to remove those features.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here, to me the taskbar is one of the most central parts of a modern OS next to file navigation and things like the start menu. It sits on your screen, visibly and permanently, and takes up a good chunk of your screen real estate. I know for many people they prefer it vertical because otherwise they have a kilometer-wide, mostly-empty taskbar taking up ~5-10% of the bottom of their screen. For me I keep it on the top of the screen because A) It's what I'm used to since the XP days and B) I find it easier to reach for than on the bottom, because my cursor is pretty much always on the top half of the screen rather than the bottom half.
> But why isn't that the end of the issue then? The feature can be fully restored.
You could make this same argument for basically every feature though, including the ones I listed. Why not remove background images and let it be handled by some 3rd party tool as well? It's about as basic as customization can get in an OS, so it should be handled natively by the OS. Not to mention that, due to it being 3rd party, it's also prone to breaking on Windows updates, and some applications rely on the OS to handle things like where to place the application window, and having things hack around OS-imposed limits like this does lead to weird behaviors and bugs.
It shouldn't require someone download 3rd party tools for functionality this basic, especially since it's already been in there since the basically the inception of the OS. Even MacOS lets you do the vertical taskbar/Dock, and that's the epitome of closed-down customization (not that Apple doesn't have similar problems, such as requiring 3rd party tools for external mice or window tiling via Rectangle).