There's a point, but I'll apologize before-hand on being long-winded about it. Please hear me out.
I have an older computer, so I tend to gravitate towards lean and low-resource tools. That doesn't mean, though, that I don't appreciate a good-looking GUI. One of the things I like about Linux is that I can look for and use different window managers like BlackBox, fvwm, xfce to find what I want. In MS Windows, I can't do that.
Well, I *almost* can. I found a Win32 port of BlackBox called bblean. This little app can actually replace explorer.exe as your shell. It has plugins for a task bar, multiple desktops, systray area, and has "styles" that you can download. All of that at under 6M memory, as opposed to explorer.exe which uses almost twice that. Sure, file management is still done through explorer.exe, but bblean takes over your window management-- your display.
The only problem is that bblean is ugly. Even the best styles are minimalistic. WindowBlinds, on the other hand, looks great! And Stardock has already made great strides and trimming any "bloat" in the product. The claim is that WB takes less resources than MS Window's own theming engine. (I don't know how to verify that.) Unfortunately, WB is still running on top of the "bloated" explorer.exe.
So I tried combining the two... WB running on top of bblean. Once I disabled bblean's bbleanskin plugin (which applies styles to windows), WB shone through. Another note about bblean: you get to the start menu by right-clicking on your desktop, and bblean doesn't do desktop icons. Well, I fixed the desktop icons with IconX, but that made me lose access to my start menu. I really didn't like bblean's taskbar anyway, so ObjectBar took care of that. Unfortunately, IconX takes nearly 5M memory itself, and ObjectBar was weighing in at a hefty +9M. With the same tuning in these that WB has had, I'm sure the memory factor can be addressed.
So here's my question and my point: Stardock has all of the elements of a GUI computing environment, and these elements don't have to rely on explorer.exe. As a matter of fact, if using WB, OB, and IconX, what part of the GUI is left for explorer.exe? The actual window management, maybe? Well, bblean can do that in half the memory. So why doesn't Stardock take care of that one missing piece themselves? Create a "Stardock Shell" using the pieces they already have?
