The control panel situation is astounding. It's clear that there are a bunch of different silo'd teams in MS doing all this work, because I can't really think of why they would do this "transition" over years of half-baked lavaflow features. It seems like there are 2 or 3 places to access any given setting. Some of them have the same UI toolkit from 2000, and others look like an Xbox application.
In Linux/BSD it always blows my mind that you can do "crazy" configuration changes like bring a LACP/LAGG interface online with essentially one command and zero downtime, while on Windows you will peck around 23 different UI's like a chicken in the sandbox only to break yourself.
I think it's more to avoid complaints and compliance issues than anything.
If they refactored everything in a single update, which I believe they are very capable of doing, I can't imagine how much shit they would get from users and businesses, look how much fuss was generated over the start menu.
By doing the snail pace transitions they can rebuff anything with a "you had years to get used to it / it's been there for ages and we didn't hear anything about this". I just don't have a clue of why they decided control panel needed to go, settings is absolutely subpar.
The irony is they get hate and complaints no matter what they do - so I believe they are optimizing the wrong metric. It's bureaucracy at work: make fuss, busy work, spend lots of money, spin wheels, start big projects then abandon them etc...
Or just make good software. Do it right the first time. Accept responsibility when things go south. If your mission is righteous the rest will fall into place.
I don't buy that one bit. They could update the UI in one go, but that's not what they decided to do. When you look at what has been brought over to the new whitespace-everywhere settings, they have decided that what needs modernisation isn't only the UI, but also the preferences themselves. That means it's really hard to change, and not everything can be changed.
Whenever something is brought to that forsaken app, the old functionality is simplified and changed. Sometimes everything makes it through to the new app, sometimes breadcrumbs are left in the back of the couch, meaning you can click on stuff and end up in XP land.
With this current strategy, I do not believe Windows will ever have one single UI for its settings like macOS.
I believe it's because important businesses literally have scripts that do things like "open the network control panel and click at the button at position (123px, 456px)". Backwards compatibility is hard.
In Linux/BSD it always blows my mind that you can do "crazy" configuration changes like bring a LACP/LAGG interface online with essentially one command and zero downtime, while on Windows you will peck around 23 different UI's like a chicken in the sandbox only to break yourself.