If the MDI-like model wasn't so much improved (i.e. liberated) in the 9x family, I'd totally agree. But 95's cleaner desktop (the Main window essentially now the taskbar/menu, rather than something you could 'minimise' but then stuck there on the 'background', whereas you didn't
need icons on the desktop background of 95, etc, obscuring the plain colour or whatever grotesque tile/stretched/centred image of the day, you had) was nice.
One thing I don't like about more recent Windows versions is the applet bar thing (that I know you don't have to have) set by default to show you weather/news/whatever, but spoiling the sparsity. cf. iGoogle/myGoogle/whatever with the regular/traditional Google front-page (sans "Make Google Your Homepage" banner, which is silly because it probably already is!). (And even when I have stuff up in front of it, I still know it's there, eating my clock-cycles! Unless I have closed it, but then I suspect it's still eating my clock-cycles unless I've closed all the processes I think that have something to do with it...)
Also, as it is, in the days of Win3.1 and previous there was very little MS GUI stuff that I ever used (Word and Excel, probably) and mostly I just didn't bother loading up Windows (on machines that had it) and stuck with the CLI and whatever GUIs or CGA 'windowing' systems the purely DOS-run apps I used to use[1], used.
[1] What did I use? You know, I can hardly remember, any more. Well, apart from games (Mavis Beacon Typing Tutor, Wolfenstein, Doom (1!), Transport Tycoon, Duke Nukem 3D, Carmageddon, depending on the era, and some CGA-using platformer that I forget the name of, from the mid '80s), there was Psion Exchange as an office suit, Cshow for images, Fractint for... mostly fun, actually. Telnet/FTP. MicroEmacs ('ue'), when I wasn't stuck with the current MS's DOS text editor. Borland C and Assembler IDEs as well. Turbo Pascal. Ah, things are coming back to me.