A good percentage of users both in business and private users simply do not want to learn a new OS each time some Geek gets another bright idea. Their best OS which was XP still meets the needs of most users in reliability and simplicity. Rather than capitalize on it MS forces a change in desktop OS design many simply never wanted.
Neither ME nor Vista deserved the vitriol they got; this Charlie Foxtrot does.
99% of ME’s quirks came from 1 of 2 default but entirely optional processes; there was a small third party tool you could run to uninstall them and the result was something as quick and stable as 98 but considerably more comfortable, compatible, and capable. My uptime on WinME was commonly limited by thunderstorms and power outages, nothing more....3 weeks was common, 6 not unheard of.
Vista has been rock solid as well, merely needed to give it room to stretch its legs. Machine came with 6 gb of RAM and I’ve managed to kill it due to mismanagement or flat out running it out of memory precisely once...due to 3boxing a new release MMO on a machine that’s stock from when SP1 came out. If a couple of MMOs didn’t bork gamma on every OS they touched, including for my sister playing on Linux via WINE, I’d never restart it except for power outages and storms.