At the time I was ready to drop 95 in the wastepaper basket when 98 came out. But I still have a fondness for 95 - especially now that I've had time to carefully install and set it up. I like 95c quite a lot now and install it in preference to 98 on most of my 95-1999 retro builds.
I stuck with 98se way past the sell-by day, skipping ME and 2K, and when I finally moved to XP I was really blown away. XP is probably my overall favorite even if I'll only rarely ever use it again. BUT - after clinging to it way past the release of W7, when I moved to 7 I was really struck by it speed and stability and didn't think about XP much after that. Gave W7 another good ride.
I moved to W10 just this last October, and to be honest - W10 made me forget *entirely* about W7. As much as I liked 7 I don't forsee ever installing it again in any 'retro' application. I was comfortable with 10 right off the bat - the shortest burn-in time by a long shot.
My 'antique' builds are based around: W95a (pure vanilla), W95c (upgraded explorer navigation & USB), W98se and XP. While I appreciate DOS/W3.1 I am old enough to have not grown up with PCs as a kid. And the last thing I wanted to do in my 20s and early 30s was waste time indoors "playing games". It wasn't until I was well into my 30s that the CD phenomina and accessible W95 interface made a enough of a big splash that I decided to buy: (a) had the cash (adult!) and (b) there was a burgeoning class of beguiling point & click adventure games that intruiged me, and flight simulators had become graphically pretty impressive.
It's a little bit of an irony that people much younger than me are devoted to the earliest era of computing, while older guys like me that didn't bother to get involved until much later for basically "night life" reasons, are more in with the second generation stuff.