System X is never as snappy and direct as 9.
I guess this is a dumb question, but why is OSX so great? I realize there were a lot of good intentions with OSX, but I am not sure the results are there.
There are articles on this. X is a modern OS (the unix, and multi-tasking, and memory management). I read an article by one of the original Mac engineers who just died in the past few months, and he was saying quite a few negative things about the new OS too. I think the lack of responsiveness comes from the heavy graphics shell to make things look pretty. I would prefer a ugly but fast mode without the prettiness sometimes. X is so slow, that the titanium powerbook 550 that I got a few years ago, I would say is almost worthless as a computing device because it gets so bogged down by X. But Apple sort of forced people onto X by making their machines not boot into 9 anymore.
I have about $1500 worth of plugs for system 9 and I saved the hard disk with their authorizations and put it into a firewire box, but it won't allow me to boot off of it with my ibook G3 unfortunately. I might buy a used G4 when they get cheaper - just to run some plugs once in a while.