I‘ve never really worked with Rhapsody, so I couldn’t tell. I came to Mac OS X from NeXTSTEP and FreeBSD, the first version I actually used as a daily driver (with the odd boot to Mac OS 9 for some stuff) was the public beta in 2000 (which was Aqua already of course).
Rhapsody was an unholy mix of NeXTstep implementation with a bastardized version of Apple's Platinum theme, which wasn't designed to support NeXT's UI and display technologies. Steve hated it and continued to use OpenStep on a ThinkPad.