Comment by acdha

I would hesitate to ascribe too much purpose to everything you see. Microsoft is a huge company with conflicting political factions and a deep ethos of maintaining backwards compatibility so there are plenty of things which people didn’t anticipate ending up where they are but which are risky to change.

One big factor is the lost era under Ballmer. Stack ranking meant that the top n% of workers got bonuses and the bottom n% were fired, and management reportedly heavily favored new features over maintenance. Since the future was WinFS and touching something core like NTFS would be a compatibility risk, you really wouldn’t have an incentive to make a change without a lot of customer demand.