Was Windows Vista THAT bad?
Yes, yes it was.
For me the point of contention was the lack of backward compatibility in both hardware and software. What made 7 shine by comparison (and still shine, it’s what I use) is by the time it came along truly compatible hardware had come down to a reasonable price point and many users (but not all, my Hospital still runs on Windows XP), especially Corporate ones, had gotten beaten down and abandoned their investment in “creaky old” 32 Bit XP applications that worked perfectly fine and committed to a new set of buggy 64 Bit ones that sported trendy user interfaces which required Hundreds of Billions of Dollars (and not low Hundreds either) in re-training on inherently inefficient software that seldom worked.
Now of course that software is mature and mostly works (mostly) but if you are tempted in any respect to migrate to the concept of Windows 10 as a service (you don’t really own it, Microsoft does) and it’s rolling upgrades every other one of which turns your computer into a brick, then I recommend Linux Mint in Cinnamon or Mate flavors, or an Xfce or more Windows mimicy build (like Trinity Desktop Environment). Trust me, it’s very familiar and won’t take that long to re-learn. Software is just different enough to avoid copyright problems and if you have something which is “mission critical” to you there are Emulators and Virtual Machines that will run it.
And 98% of it is free.