Sure, and Windows 95/98/2000/ME/XP/Vista/7/8 were the second coming of christ, right? /s
Of course it's a piece of shit, but so is pretty much every major release of Windows. If you're running XP, 7, or 8, you're just as gullible people running 10.
Unfortunately, it's still mostly a necessary evil for playing games. I basically run my Windows partition exclusively for playing games, and in that case I'd rather keep it up to date to be able to use the latest versions of DirectX. It sucks but that seems to be the best way to roll atm. I don't even run Windows at my job, so trust me that I'd rather avoid it if I could.
I freely admit that I somewhat regret moving to 10 however, but I just haven't had the time or energy do a 7 re-install. It shouldn't take much effort mind you, but JA2 is actually the first game that gave me trouble on Win 10, so I haven't had much incentive either.
Why don't you run it on Linux?
Like I said, I run an Arch partition next to my Windows partition, and I use it for basically everything non-gaming. I would definitely give JA2 on Linux a shot if it ran natively. Props to the Wine devs for their work on it and all, but it's still a colossal hack that I'd rather avoid when I can. GOG ships JA2 for Mac with Wine for example, but it doesn't work on either of my OSX machines.
And like I said, Straciatella runs terrible for me. That includes both the Windows and Linux builds. Otherwise, that would have probably been the setup I'd have gone with.