XP was the first NT-version with a Home Edition. If you’d been running Windows 2000 at home you would’ve felt the same way (XP is basically just 2000 with a facelift, NT 5.0 to NT 5.1) and even NT4 was pretty good (though 2000 was better).

The 9x series (95, 98, ME) were built on a different kernel and designed specifically for home use and were, in comparison, terrible. ME was especially terrible as they tried to bring plug-and-play to the 9x core without NT’s hardware abstraction layer and shit did not work well.