Now, if Micros~1 were, in truth, a tech company, they'd have created several small, replaceable DLLs, each of which would have contained a single, tightly integrated, loosely coupled, function set that did a single job.

But that's exactly what they did! Are you sure it isn't time to admit that you just don't know what you're talking about here?

No, but it would be nice if you did. What they actually did was take those nice small DLLs, and cut their APIs into several, non-orthoganal parts, and pack them into a couple of system DLLs. This is not "several small, replaceable DLLs, each of which would have contained a single, tightly integrated, loosely coupled, function set that did a single job." (I assume you can read at the 6th grade level...if not, I'll dummy it down for you, if you'll promise you'll try to keep up....)