I hear you and am not trying to advocate for Windows 10. The only point I would make is that my own personal experience is it has not caused any major issues and I have had zero installation “Nightmares”. I too have used just about every OS on: Mobile, PC, RISC, SPARC, POWERPC etc. platforms that was available for over 25 years. I test proprietary software for a living and I am just not seeing the issue most people pile onto Windows 10. Maybe I’m lucky, maybe its my experience.
I will say that the Windows 10 installation did disable a DVD writer I have on a 10 year old system. I removed the device, searched for devices and it re-installed itself without any issues. This only caused me some heartache because I never checked it after the original installation and thought it was a hardware failure. I stupidly removed the drive before I thought to put it back in and go the software driver route. I also have perfectly functional Windows ME OEM on an old Micron and VISTA on an old Dell Laptop. I think I put Win2K on the Micron and the Dell was eventually upgraded to Win 7 before it was retired.
Anyone who is happy with Windows 10 should expound on its virtues if they want. They should probably expect a little blow back from people such as myself who are not fond of it. It's true, my primary issue is with not having much control over the update process. there are other areas where taking control of your own computer has become more difficult or confusing as well.
I too have had driver issues with older but still useful peripherals. I have a fairly new drawing tablet that has instability issues every time it is hooked to a Windows 10 computer even with the latest drivers. I still have a problem with the way Microsoft attempted to force this down our throats whether we wanted it or not. Overall Windows 10 wasted a significant amount of time before I finally swore it off and went back to Windows 7 on every device that we could.
The thing that I will admit is that for people such as my parents who mostly look at emails and browse the Internet, it does tend to keep them out of trouble most of the time.