Many users refer to the ugliness of the start screen tile colors as a regression all the way back to Windows 3 and EGA colors, 16 simultaneously displayed colors out of a palette of 64. It's not just the removal of the Aero transparency feature, it's also the design of Windows.

EGA graphic adapters at the time (30+ years ago) had 16KB of video memory. The latest Nvidia adapter has 12GB. A mere 750,000 times more. Moore's law (twice the performance every 2 years) is completely off the chart, it shouldn't have happened before 2023 for memory capacity, 2040 for the number of colors!

Me, I think EGA was a great improvement on CGA's 16 colors, or the green and black or Hercules amber and black monitors, so you can bet nostalgic me loves Windows 8. Not!  ;)