So, you old geekster, you just instinctively knew you had to use Windows 8's Charms bar to get to the Shutdown command, right? And right off the bat, you just had a feel for Windows 8 and you just opened and closed Windows 8 apps with ease and found the Desktop right away and effortlessly moved back and forth between the Windows 8 Start screen and the Desktop. Is that right? 
An analogous statement could be made for Windows 95 as compared to windows 3.1 eg.
You just instinctively knew you had to press a button labelled "Start" to get to the shutdown command, right? And right off the bat, you just had a feel for the Windows 95 Taskbar and you opened and closed Windows 95 Apps with ease and found the Start Menu easier to navigate than the Program Manager and effortlessly switched between applications using taskbar buttons rather than desktop icons, is that right?
FWIW though I found the desktop pretty easily. I pressed escape. See, I use the logic that the Start Screen has replaced the
start menu. it did not replace the Desktop. How do you close an Open Start Menu? You press escape.
Also, in my personal use case, I use Start->Search for EVERYTHING. This isn't limited to win8 of course. Therefore some of what you addressed to geek isn't even necessary- for example, you can type "shutdown" into search. The item it finds is labelled "Turn off your PC" which seems pretty clear in what it does. No need for charms there.
Based on some of my co-workers who installed classic Shell and their program-management preferences, I've come to conclude that there really is something most who dislike Win8 have in common.
That is the All Program Menu. That is, people that use Start->All Programs to launch applications. Since the Start Screen rearranges the heirarchal content into tiles, people that used to drill down through the Start Menu may be disillusioned.
However, what those people fail to realize is that the All Programs menu has been effectively deprecated. Windows Vista moved the All Programs Menu so that it appeared within the main Start Menu, rather than filling the screen. The fact that you could Search through them with the Search bar more than made up for this- It's a rare instance where a person is going to meander through their start menu "just browsing"; usually you are going to start an application and know what you want.
I know I personally find using XP and Earlier mildly frustrating; I lost count of the number of times I pressed the Windows key and started typing a entry to search for before realizing that XP didn't have that feature.
Than the fact that I had to drill down through several levels to get and find the Application I wanted to launch simply solidified how massive the productivity boost from the Search bar was.
The reason I surmise that the people who have issues with Windows 8's Start Screen might be adapted to using the All Programs menu is that the Start Screen is semantically the same as the Win7 and Windows Vista Start menu when it comes to Search.
