Small correction, Windows CE and Pocket PC weren't Windows so we didn't "bring it over". That mess didn't come later until windows phone.
In the defense of ce/ppc, we weren't really thinking about the fs as user visible so didn't give it much thought. Also, while I'm not shifting all of the blame, lots of that cruft was driven by OEMs as well. Our internal images were pretty clean on the fs from what I can remember.
Appreciate the clarification. It may not have literally been ported over, but it certainly felt like it was culturally imported. Anytime I used one of these devices it made me wince feeling like having a little messy desktop os in a piece of consumer electronics seeming more complex and fragile than it ought to be.
Yeah, I think you're right, it was cultural. For me, rather than the influence from Windows what I see is the focus on what we called "enterprise customers" at the time and leadership was obsessed about them because they were guaranteed huge orders for large numbers of devices. They largely don't exist as a thing anymore, BYOD killed them.
Enterprise customers and operators didn't view the fs of a mobile device as a thing the end user should manage or care about. So neither did we, or our OEMs (for the most part).
Of course, this is all just the opinions of one guy decades after the fact. For reference, I was a dev, lead, dev manager in the CE/mobile/phone teams from ~00-08 and contributed to ActiveSync, device PIM sync, device stability, and later worked directly with OEMs to design and build new phones (things like the Samsung BlackJack).
In the defense of ce/ppc, we weren't really thinking about the fs as user visible so didn't give it much thought. Also, while I'm not shifting all of the blame, lots of that cruft was driven by OEMs as well. Our internal images were pretty clean on the fs from what I can remember.