Sounds more like your fuckup. Windows 7 was released ~4.5 years ago, and you didn't see it on the horizon? Not only that, Windows Vista was on SP2 in 2009 and the issues which earned its reputation were largely fixed. The biggest problems with Vista were poor performance on low-spec machines and over-zealous UAC. New hardware with enough RAM fixed issue 1, and UAC was appropriately adjusted with SP1. When Windows 7 was released, many pointed out that the differences between Vista and 7 were mostly cosmetic, which is true to a point.
So to me it seems like you weren't paying attention and were allowing your own biases to feed your decision, which is why you're stuck on XP today. Sounds like you're going to make the same mistake again, because Windows 8 is empirically better than Windows 7 in terms of performance, stability, resource usage, and security. 100% of the complaints relate to UI, and I don't know if you've seen the news but the start menu is returning for you. Try to stay on top of things so this doesn't happen to you again!