The problem is that the artstyle is usually thrown out the window with these kinds of mods. They all end up looking very similar because of the amount of work you have to put in to make it look acceptable.
Not to mention, the hacky nature of RTX Remix is very limiting and the implementation is not very good to begin with (and very hard to use as a result).
I hadn't caught up with NVIDIA's RTX Remix SDK stuff but I plan on taking a look at this myself and do a more in-depth render integration with something (be it the Remix DXVK fork itself or something like UE5). I mod BlackBox NFS games extensively and I plan on cooking something up that is technically better than anything before.
You're mostly correct. People here don't take Windows praise lightly.
NT is probably the best part about Windows. If you're gonna complain about Windows, the kernel is the last thing to complain about.
As you've said, there are things that are still better about NT to this day;
OOM conditions are way better - system continues to run mostly fine after emergency swapping memory pages into the page file. No crashes, just a freeze until the OS swaps stuff out. No data is usually lost due to this. Apps continue to run and you have the chance to save and reboot your machine.
The driver architecture, as you've alluded to, is much more flexible. No need to rebuild a DKMS module every time the kernel updates. The drivers are self-contained and best of all - backwards compatible. You can still use XP 64-bit drivers on modern Windows (if you ever need to)
Process scheduling is very good for anything equal to or lower than 64 CPU threads. Windows at its core can multitask pretty good on one thread and that scales up to a certain point.
Most of NT stigma comes from NTFS (which has its own share of problems) and the bugcheck screens that people kept seeing (which weren't even mostly MS' fault to begin with, that was on the driver vendors).
Mark Russinovich has some of his old talks up on his YT channel and one of them compares Linux (2.6 at the time) to NT and goes into great detail. Most of the points made there still applies to this day.
Not to mention - this isn't necessarily the correct place for Windows anyway. That is exactly why they standardized stuff around Vista.
Plus - what about apps that store an ungodly amount data in there? Personally, I only keep the OS and basic app data (such as configs and cache) on the partition and nothing else.
Then something like Minecraft comes along and it's like "humpty dumpty I'm crapping a lumpty" and stores all its data in ".minecraft" right there in your user directory.
Then you gotta symlink stuff around and it becomes a mess...
It's already been done. Black Box's NFS Carbon until Undercover all have ad clients built in that did that exact thing (displaying real ads on billboards).
Luckily it doesn't work but if someone were to buy the domain it could be dangerous.
I'm referring to the philosophy behind the usage of said allocated ram.
If you allocate 5 cookie jars to store 1 cookie in each jar, then that's not good.
If you store 2 cookies per jar, that's better already, but still kind of crap.
If the websites keep putting rocks in those jars, then you'll obviously run rampant with usage. (Read: https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/ )
The goal is to store as many cookies in least amount of jars. You might crumble them down and reconstruct them later (compression and/or clever code) but that could take more brain (processing) power (of which we kinda have, especially on the desktop).
As you've said, it's often a tradeoff between processing power and memory usage and depending on the application, you can configure things the way you need them (at least when you're coding it).
MTG poops and Yugipoops never get old