Re: Yep
"The point is that you have to individually drag each tile into place, which is a colossal hassle. On a classic desktop, you can select multiple icons and manipulate them, but with Metro, it's a tedious process of dragging and rearranging them, one by one, which is frustrating and inefficient."
Well for a start, things default to a set of groups that do have a rationale behind them. For example, all my Office icons fall together. Secondly, it's very easy to drag things to a new position. You just do it and the other tiles arrange themselves accordingly, making space. It's something which if you are unhappy with the default order, you have to spend a minute doing. And maybe update occasionally when you install a program if it pops up somewhere you don't like. It's no more onerous than dragging something in the Win7 Start Menu to pin a program. Seriously if a highly infrequent operation that takes a minute or less is "frustrating and inefficient" then I am quite frankly frightened of how highly strung you must be. This is no reason to reject a desktop environment.
"The W7 Start Menu bubbles to the top commonly-used programs, so if I open my Start Menu on W7, I get the applications I use the most"
And this might be fine if you use a handful of programs, but I am a power user and I may launch twenty different programs in a week quite frequently. It's slightly annoying to wonder whether something will be in the menu today or if I'll have to navigate down through sub-menus. And I don't want twenty different icons pinned to the Start Menu. If you think it's an advantage to have your most commonly used programs "bubble to the top" then logically you should welcome the Start Screen which allows even more of your most commonly used programs to bubble to the top. The Start Screen on my Desktop easily accomodates fifty programs and with column spacing between groups, it's very easy to know immediately where they are. Though I normally just hit the Windows key and type the first couple of letters. A process that is the same on both Win7 and Win8 (though slightly faster on the latter). So objectively, Win8 is better by the criteria you just gave.
"In W7, I have the choice of scrolling through All Programs, *which is alphabetized*, and finding my program *or* typing in the search box"
You can still type and search. Just hit Windows Key and start typing. It's my preferred method and in my experience, faster than Win7. I don't know about your Win7 but it's not alphabetised. It's hierarchical. So you might have to hunt for a program under its company name. And it's twice as many clicks to get "All Programs" as it is to get the Start Screen which has all the normally used programs (space for fifty tiles on the first page, remember?)
"In Windows 8, every single program installed on my computer is shat all over the Start screen in an unorganized mess and to organize them, I have to drag and drop *every single fucking icon* into order."
Firstly, this is not true. Not all programs are placed on the main Start Screen. You have to go into extended mode with an extra click to see all installed programs. Secondly, there is an order. E.g. all my office suite are columned together. All the communication stuff which has updates gets put on the left, etc. Alphabatised - which you praised earler - would be a terrible way to do it. E.g. Excel sits next to Fiddler2, Word is over next to Windows Media Center... Thirdly, re-arranging them should only take you a couple of minutes (unless you are staggeringly less capable at the task than I was) and needs doing only once and then occasionally if you install a program you might drag it somewhere else if you like. And those dozens of tiles will all stay where you put them too, without "bubbling" out of view.
"On top of that, things I might actually like to access by default, like the Control Panel, are hidden."
But 98% of users wont want to. Especially now that all the settings a user typically might need are accessible through the Charms sidebar. So if you're in the 2% that do want to use Control Panel frequently and you object to just hitting the Win key and typing 'co', then drag it onto you main Start Screen. That will take you ten seconds and is a one-time operation, Do you think the rest of the Windows using world should have a rarely used and confusing icon put on the main Start Screen because you wish to avoid that ten seconds of one-time activity?
"Also, the W8 start screen is hideously ugly"
Well the rest of your arguments were things I could objectively refute but this is a matter of taste so all I can say is that I like it. But regarding this:
"on the other, many people prefer a less-cluttered desktop, and Microsoft has basically told all of us to go fuck ourselves"
I just don't understand. With Win7, many people end up with program shortcuts all over their Desktop. In Win8, it's far more likely to be clean and free because program start icons all go onto the Start Screen.