Nah, its not rose tinted glasses. Win2000/Win2003 were amazing. I still run Win2003 because it just workz. GUI is great, it snappy, I have all the tools to tinker here and there.. Leaked SRC code helps tiny bit ;)
Win7 wasnt that bad, you still could set classic GUI. If they only kept it like this and plow money to improve kernel...
In 2012, I was working for a company that did all the development for its Windows clients on an ancient version of Visual Studio running in a Windows 2003 VM, and I discovered that the Windows 2003 running in a VM could transfer files over the network faster than Windows 7 running on bare metal. I feel like transferring files over the network has been horrible in Windows ever since. Transferring over USB was often horrible as well, but that seems somewhat better now.