I mainly remember (mostly) not wanting to install it because of the so many weird things it does, or rather it did when I last used it more than a decade ago (including strange NTFS ACLs to emulate POSIX permissions).

What do you mean "remember"? It still makes using the command line in Windows tolerable. And yes, I am familiar with PowerShell, and NO I'm not interested in using it.

I remember Steve Yeggie selling me on it as a better Unix than Unix, then getting bogged down in cryptic inexplicable failure modes

Really cool technology really early, but I can't say I'm nostalgic!

Yep, I used it a lot. Made Windows tolerable.