You might not think WinXP is crap but I sure do, and I use it 24/7!
(of course I guess it really depends on what you are comparing WinXP to, because WinXP is better than Win95,98.ME but that isn't saying much!)
While win98se was the SP2 of Win98, WinMe was the stop gap between the old Win95 core and the new Win2000 core. If you remember, Microsoft wasn't able to combine the two different kernels in time so they went ahead and release an "updated" win95 core OS, WinME. And WinReL is going to be the stopgap between WinXP and Longhorn.