In other words, they decided to rewrite the theme stuff while neglecting to realise that there's existing code (which they mostly broke around the time of Win8 by removing the Appearance control panel...) that would do what they wanted.
I'm in agreement with the others here that Windows 2000 was probably the peak of consistent UI in Windows. XP didn't really regress but added bitmap-style skinning to the elements, and up until 7 the Windows Classic theme was fully customisable. In Win8 they removed that, and it's been a clear downhill from there.
> I'm in agreement with the others here that Windows 2000 was probably the peak of consistent UI in Windows. XP didn't really regress but added bitmap-style skinning to the elements, and up until 7 the Windows Classic theme was fully customisable. In Win8 they removed that, and it's been a clear downhill from there.
I agree almost, but not quite 100% with that. My tiny disagreement: The decline set in a bit earlier, not after but some time in the W7 era: Up until some point you could set window border width to 0 in the Appearance control panel applet; after that this input field was apparently made read-only for the user. For a while after that you could "hack" that by editing a Registry value, but AFAICR they disabled that, too. (Or rather, if not exactly disabled Registry editing, made the display driver ignore it.)
I'm in agreement with the others here that Windows 2000 was probably the peak of consistent UI in Windows. XP didn't really regress but added bitmap-style skinning to the elements, and up until 7 the Windows Classic theme was fully customisable. In Win8 they removed that, and it's been a clear downhill from there.