Re: You're nuts
"Say what you want, but it's undeniably the case that Windows has been requiring less hardware, not more, as newer versions have rolled out. I'm currently running 10 very happily on hardware on which XP was a bit of a dog."
I am sure you are being sarcastic. Since May, Windows 10 no longer supports 32-bit for a start. And if you had a 64-bit machine with Windows XP, it would likely have been running like a very impressive dog. Not because 64-bit is "fast". But it implies quite modern hardware for that era.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-au/windows-hardware/design/minimum/minimum-hardware-requirements-overview#section-30---minimum-hardware-requirements-for-windows10-for-desktop-editions
How are you getting around the WDDM / XDDM graphics card issues? You really only have the VESA fallback driver if using a machine from XP era and I am fairly certain your experience with it is likely piss poor.