Absolutely that's what they're doing. The old Control Panel is very byzantine and cannot be completely done away with primarily because it's a modular system t

Absolutely that's what they're doing. The old Control Panel is very byzantine and cannot be completely done away with primarily because it's a modular system that vendors hook into when they add proprietary configurations for their hardware or software (e.g. Synaptics, Lenovo, Intel, Adobe). For backwards compatibility purposes they cannot just scrap it. The aspects of the Control Panel that they do control have portions that date all the way back to Windows 3.1 and it's no small feat for them to refactor them into Modern UI apps. Instead of halting all OS progress until that herculean effort can be completed, they've chosen to gradually migrate or deprecate Control Panel features. This has been an on going project since Windows 8 and they've made a lot of progress. Many of the ancient UI elements like the "Windows Color and Appearance" panel are gone in Windows 10. Personally I'd rather have it happen this way than the Apple approach (i.e. removing the UI and forcing you to edit plist files).