Well you can always turn on the option to show your same desktop wallpaper behind the start screen. Might help some. I for one LOVE the fact that I don't have to manually delete all the crap extra icons programs install on the start menu like I used to on Win 7 and below. I can just leave all the garbage in the down-arrow screen and type-to-search the few things I want, and pin just those to the main screen. Once you remove all the junk on the start screen that came there by default, you can easily get a screen that doesn't even need to scroll sideways and fit all the commonly used icons there, neatly organized.
There does not appear to be any filtering at all, at least not at 200% where it can just double up the pixels with ease. It might filter at 125% or 150%, I don't know. Here is a screenshot where I put arrows pointing at good and bad font rendering on a few screens of common OS things: http://ark42.com/win8.1/192dpi...