People liked XP, Microsoft hit it perfect
People tolerate Win 7 because it’s more XP like than Vista. Though if it weren’t for programs like Classic Shell more people would really hate 7 also.
The further Microsoft gets away from XP the more people are going to reject their OS
While I think you are correct on some level, I think people tend to draw too sharp distinctions between the various releases of windows. As someone who works in a related industry, I know that when a new release is brought out, it’s not as though they ripped up the old release and started from scratch. That sort of thing is just not possible nor desirable. There is typically a continuous train of development from which specific releases are pulled. If you could look at the source code for windows 2000, XP, Me, Vista, Win7 you’d likely find way more code in common than is different. In many ways the core OS likely stays largely the same while the ‘fit and finish’ is changed partly for functional reasons partly for marketing reasons.
As much as folks liked XP, XP is not coming back, any more than brick phones, cars with huge tail fins, or nehru jackets. All those things had their day and something else has come along to take its place. That’s just how things are.
Is there an independent effort by users to fix and upgrade XP?
I’m one of the people who thinks that XP, with some additional backup/recovery and checkpointing features from 7, would be my ideal version of Windows... and I’d see no point in upgrading ever again.