Comment by elzbardico

NT is different from Unix, it is heavily inspired by VMS, which was the anti-Unix of its time. The basic architectural metaphors are different, and the way you think about things is different. It is more architectured and more opinionated, which may look like over-engineering for some and a superbly coherent design for others. There are some pain points, of course, a lot of them related to the need to support code written for a completely different OS (MS-DOS + Windows non-nt), but overall, I think that the general architecture of NT is pretty neat, and I would dare say, beautiful in some places.