Am I the only one who wants to go back to Mavericks in 2017?

[kissmo]

Wouldn’t it be interesting if actual responsiveness time then was the same or even longer than now, where perhaps an overall sense of preferring certain interface cues made things “easier to use” feel more responsive and quick as a result?

Yes well put. Indeed maybe the whole picture of things make it easier to use and felt like that.
Some things are harder to put in words, but you explained it well.

 

[Tozovac]

I personally loved the slightly more "vibrant" OS. I thought Mavericks struck a good balance by ditching the excessive Skeuomorphism, but striking a nice balance. It was a very uncontroversial and stable release.

I felt forced to move into Sierra from Mavericks in order to maintain basic required functions, but I miss Mavericks as it was the last OS I felt was designed to work a certain way moreso than to look a certain way.

 

[maverick28]

I still find Mavericks usable for the majority of tasks. Of course, the weakest spot is browsing but I used running Chrome 67 - the latest version available for the OS X - which still is 100 compliant; it loads any site and that is a trademark of Chrome which scores the highest points for W3C standards compatibility of all market players and is perfectly usable long after the end of active support (something that Apple's Safari fails at by design). That was until I tried Firefox Quantum (Mavericks and newer) and this thing in my experience beats even Chrome 67 by speed, functional out-of-the-box versatility (smth that Chrome lacks).
Moreover, I keep spreading the word about a port of Firefox Quantum for unsupported systems such as Lion and Mountain Lion named "Firefox Legacy" by Ethan Nelson-Moore (parrotgeek1) that yields the same robustness as the authentic Firefox and is better than any supported browser in any field for systems that old.
If interested download Firefox Legacy here and see yourself:
https://parrotgeek.com/fxlegacy.html

Also, I found that Metal-based macOS are not quite up to their declared benefits when installed on older machines: I witness a degraded performance of animations to some degree, and there's nothing more evident than frame dropping in Desktop thumbnails of Mission Control - something that was present neither in Lion nor in Mavericks. Watch:

 

[retta283]

Mavericks is still quite usable for most. I however prefer Snow Leopard, much smoother, and the design is much more appealing to me. I have a 2008 and 2010 iMac with SL, both run great.

 

[avz]

Mavericks is still quite usable for most. I however prefer Snow Leopard, much smoother, and the design is much more appealing to me. I have a 2008 and 2010 iMac with SL, both run great.

I've found that Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion choke on 1080p video(I use SpaceBar Quick View for my test) on my MacBook5,1. On the other hand Mavericks makes me feel like my 2GHz C2D machine has much more more power than it is actually required for a smooth 1080p video playback. I believe that's because of the superior hardware encoding.

 

[retta283]

I've found that Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion choke on 1080p video(I use SpaceBar Quick View for my test) on my MacBook5,1. On the other hand Mavericks makes me feel like my 2GHz C2D machine has much more more power than it is actually required for a smooth 1080p video playback. I believe that's because of the superior hardware encoding.

Interesting, I haven't had any problems with 1080p videos on my iMacs following Leopard. My 2006 CD MacBook cannot properly play HD content on Tiger or Leopard, but at least 720 videos work great on Snow Leopard. Haven't tried to play my 1080 videos.