I don't like the W10 desktop-mode Start menu because live tiles are pretty useless if they are out of sight almost all of the time.
So really you might just as well have icons. Unfortunately, live tiles aren't as good as icons because there is no text field underneath (or alongside) them. So instead of having the program name under the icon to prompt you, you have to memorise the icon of every program you might want to pin to the Start menu. OK, for some programs (like MS Office) the icons are clear and memorable. But for many other programs they definitely aren't.
So on the whole, I would say the W10 Start menu offers almost nothing over the W7 Start menu, and in fact is much worse because you can only pin tiles, not icons.
I said "almost nothing" - the one thing W10 offers is the ability to put pinned tiles into groups, which sadly you cannot do on W7. In that one respect the W10 menu is better. But 1x1 tiles are useless compared to the similarly-sized icons, and MS has made a big mistake by stopping you displaying icons in the pinned area.