As someone who used to use Vista, I didn't think it was that terrible. I mean, it was early on. It crashed a lot, and very loudly. Forget the blue screen of death, the screen would just get all distorted while ungodly loud garbled audio sounded for a few seconds followed by the PC shutting down completely.
However, as Vista updated, that lessened and eventually stopped. At that point, while Vista wasn't anything amazing, it got the job done. It did have probably the best version of Windows Movie Maker though. Win 7 was superior in pretty much every other way, and I still consider it superior to Win 10 aside from it's lack of DX12 support and the fact that it's no longer officially supported and thus runs a larger risk of PC infection than an up to date Win 10 PC.