I think it was windows 8 or 10 that introduced the new menus which I found somehow both too simplistic and harder to navigate. And then sometimes you get lucky and figure out a way to open the old menus to do what you actually want.
Yeah it still uses the old Control Panel system, which is far from perfect (it's really bad about "dialog tunnels" where some things are buried too many levels deep), but overall is more servicable for technical users.
Another thing that it has over XP is that it's better at providing a minimally usable environment post-install, with a better payload of default drivers. I don't miss booting into 256 color 640x480 and trying to get all the hardware in a functional state without a network connection like was a frequent occurrence with XP and older.
The new menus are really fun in 11, where it starts out new, and then when you want more info pretty much everything changes back (font/kerning/color) to the point of feeling you need to do a doubletake. Its something that if it happened online you'd swear you've been slip-streamed and shouldn't continue. Guess they dont have anyone who can move over the old items to the new look, go figure.
The old dialogs used to be extensible, in that getting random software like mouse drivers to just add a new tab to the mouse control panel was the way to do things. The new one is, as far as I know, not that. So there's a chance that they left random bits alone because they're afraid to break things.
Or that's merely the justification to push back against the designers…
I always try to reach to arrive at the old configuration before I even consider looking at the text, the newer version just wastes my time and the setting is never there or labelled wrong.
I think it was windows 8 or 10 that introduced the new menus which I found somehow both too simplistic and harder to navigate. And then sometimes you get lucky and figure out a way to open the old menus to do what you actually want.
I think Windows 7 was my favorite as well.