I wish I could find them, but I read at least a decade ago, a write up of how hard it is to ship code changes into a system like Windows. Something as obvious to me as "dark mode" comes with so many strings, that modifying a DLL to include it comes with even bigger strings. At the time I read it, they were maintaining at least 5 and probably more like 10 release trains off the same code base. I would think it has got worse.<p>The strange thing is that one thing Microsoft did well, was implement huge amounts of code introspection embedded meta-information inside the DLL and EXE. They really do know the code weave. If there was a low hanging fruit here to change, they of all people would know it.<p>Later write ups about what motivates C-suites in the FAANG made me think that optimising for end user experience is pretty low in the drive: If you were hired on a KPI to deliver that, you would work harder on it. If you are hired on a KPI to improve shareholder value and somebody is convinced that moving the menu bar 3 pixels left is the thing which will do it, you will get very direct instructions to achieve it.<p>Dark mode isn't affecting licence purchases enough to be visible on anyone's radar, where "anyone" means "anyone who can make it happen"<p>(I tried to chase down Microsoft X.509 certificate Issuer-Subject chaining issues to make it possible to specify which of a number of certificates I wanted it to apply to some process. It was very painful. The closest I got to this was finding a consultant who at least understood the problem. He was a 20+ year Microsoft industry insider and he convinced me it would never, happen, noting that the US government had marked the problem out 2-3 years before me and it still wasn't fixed)