It's hard to undersell how massive a usability improvement the Start menu was compared to System 7 installed-application-launching, where you had to either manually mess with aliases or just root around the Finder each time.
Well System 7.5 came out around the same time and bundled the hierarchical Apple Menu (which IIRC was some shareware they acquired), into which everyone stuck an alias of their Applications folder, resulting in a pretty similar (if somewhat less fully featured) UI.
