For sure, Windows 7 had quite good design with its transparency, as did Vista. The early Longhorn builds and prototypes definitely went too far, but certainly looked a lot nicer. They weren't particularly practical, with some text difficult to read, with attempts to add contrast with weird drop shadow glows around text.
I believe the reason they stepped away from that was partly to do with accessibility of a standard Windows desktop having the right levels of contrast. From memory, they made a point of this in Office 2010, when Office 2007's ribbon didn't conform to access ability standards with poor contrasted text on the blue background.
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