I wasn't flaming anyone so I have no idea where you get that from, but anyway, the fact (not opinion) remains that when Vista was released there were all kinds of program compatibility and driver issues, issues that remained for a long time, I didn't skip Vista entirely like you assumed, I tried it out and a few programs that I used didn't run in Vista, for me that sucked and I didn't even have to deal with any hardware issues like a lot of my friends did, I had a dual boot of Vista and XP running for about a year, after trying out Vista I found myself using it less and less until I hardly ever booted up with it at all during the last 8 months or so before I removed it...
Vista was also huge resource hog, Windows 7 doesn't have that problem, for me it's just as fast as XP was and that alone puts it ahead of Vista for about 75% of the users out there who have average or older systems, you don't have to understand Vista from a technical standpoint to see that it was slow on average systems and some programs and hardware just simply didn't work for a long time, it's short run compared to XP's speaks volumes about how viable Microsoft considered Vista as the replacement for XP after the initial debacle, it was so bad that retailers started giving people the option to get XP on their new systems instead of the newer Vista, even if Windows 7 is just an updated version of Vista, the changes made and the stigma of the actual Vista name made it more practical for Microsoft to change the name because first impressions and name recognition are huge...
and saying that Windows 7 isn't on the market yet so it's functionality as an operating system can't be determined doesn't make sense, that's what all the pre-releases are for, to see where there may be problems and to iron out the issues that come up before releasing the "final" product for the consumer, the final product and the RC will be different, but not drastically so, sure Vista is fine now and has been, but after how many service packs...? plain and simple, people are excited about Windows 7 because it has less issues during pre-release than Vista had after the first SP was released, there is no comparison between Vista and Windows 7 in comparable stages of their development, to deny that is just silly...