You're right that there should be some sort of affordance to access programs. What I meant was that the problem isn't that there's no `start` menu - it's that

You're right that there should be some sort of affordance to access programs. What I meant was that the problem isn't that there's no `start` menu - it's that there's no consistent, intuitive, and quick way to access any program (along with having to switch UI's between desktop and metro, and a lot of other things) which are problems that the start menu originally solved.