@bbhaag
First, I don't take anything personally unless the person makes it so. I always look at differing viewpoints and don't mind admitting when I'm wrong.
With that said, I know how to use the Start Screen and everything you say is stuff I already know. Part of my job entails learning the ins and outs of new releases on Windows. Maybe not to the degree of a knowing everything about the OS or how to do everything, but certainly enough to navigate day to day, troubleshoot common errors, and use certain "power user" level functions. I need to know this for installation and testing of B2B based software that the company I work for develops and to test many different hardware and devices that we use/deploy that a normal user will never use.
The common theme, and the point of my complaint of Win8 is MS "forcing" me to use the Metro UI when all I want to use is a desktop OS. These changes may help touch based devices like tablets but the problem is these changes arguably do not increase productivity or ease of use when I'm testing hardware and software or writing up a bug report. Quite the opposite, some of the changes actually hinder many power users until said power user configure things in Win8 to not use Metro at every opportunity. It's actually quite jarring to find yourself in a full screen app when you first use Win8 and you have no idea how to exit a Metro app. As a desktop user, I shouldn't have to put up with such annoyances out of the box.
All of this is extremely ironic since the B2B software we develop is 90% touch based and one of the major components of the hardware we deploy is a touchscreen. Although in our case, you should never ever see the Windows desktop on our B2B software.
My main rig at home has Win 8.1 but there is no way in hell I'd use that on my system at work. My productivity would drop. My beef with Win8 is not that Metro is in there. It's a fine UI for touch based devices like tablets though there obviously needs refinement. It's just that Metro is not a desktop UI and should not have been forced down our throats.