Yeah, it's pretty annoying.

I could happily live without animation, transparency, and rounded corners in my UI.

Not sure what new 'features' I couldn't live without. I don't use the background indexing/search stuff, I switch off Cortana, I try to stop as much of the background stuff as I can.

Perhaps there's some pressure from the underlying platform too - modern PCs seem to be more complicated than the ones we used to run XP on.