Aw I missed blades. After the first update that sped up the animations it was fantastic. It made it easy to find whatever you needed, and it was cool how themes could have a different image for each page (I had the Castle Crashers one)
I felt like every update after that had ulterior motives (showing off your avatar so you’ll buy more items, Kinect integration, advertising, unifying with the Windows “Metro” UI, etc)