Well, I'm sure you'd hate it if your smartphone would keep white text labels without outlines on your home screen if you set a very bright custom background. I'

Well, I'm sure you'd hate it if your smartphone would keep white text labels without outlines on your home screen if you set a very bright custom background. I've just tried it on my phone: if I set a mostly white background image, I can still use the home screen because the text also has a dark drop shadow (for exactly these kinds of situations!). That illustrates my point quite nicely I think: there are fewer settings now, but - when done right - those that are available behave quite well. Theming was just the first example that came to my mind. It's a pretty benign one in the grand scheme of things. There were other ways in which you could misconfigure your system. These were also the days before PCI, USB and hardware auto-detection. You could easily pick the wrong driver and/or wrong settings for some hardware and the system would mostly just try to run with it, not knowing that anything was amiss. Pick the wrong mouse driver? Set the wrong COM port for the serial mouse? Tough luck.