At the time, people would endlessly complain about every new version or even small change, too. I don't remember the complaining to be worse for the (in hindsight) worse versions. Plus it's only the complaints that you hear about, very few people will rave about how great something is. Personally I thought that Windows 7 was a majors step backwards from XP and avoided it, skipping straight to 8, which I thought was great.