Personally, I liked the NXE best, but that was because it was three dimensional, but the integration between it and Kinect did not work.
Metro is technically Blades on steroids. People just don't quite realize it.
Consider each Blade to be a view. The blades interface had 5 (your screen shot is not the last version of the Blades). With Metro there are now 8 (down from 9). Navigate by view, rather than by tile, and you've got essentially the same thing as the Blades but with more 3 more views, and roughly the same number of options depending on which Blade you were working with.
In the beginning, with little content, the Blade interface was ok. Navigating to the different views was easy, but once you dug deeper everything broke down. That was the problem. On the surface, yeah the Blade interface sort of worked, but go one level deeper and the UI paradigm shifted. Go another level down, and once again another paradigm shift. NXE worked hard to create a consistent interface between the top and lower levels, but at times it too broke down. Not to mention stuff got easily buried and or hidden.
I think the latest Metro update does a good job of providing a consistent interface between the top and lower levels. Usability if you actually use voice commands is significantly improved as well. Last I knew, you couldn't use voice commands with the Blades interface to have it take you to what you want.
