Who are the individuals that are saying that all eight-million downloads are actually being used? How many people on the different Win 8 forums are stating that they actually use these third party Start Menus?
Let look at Stardock and Start8. When they first came out with Start8 they were giving it away free for life, what, yeah "FREE FOR LIFE." Guess what, they must have forgotten what they said, because Free for Life became $5.00 (sorry forgot about the 30 day demo you could download from CNET), CNET shows about 450,000 downloads. Now who is to say of the other 2.5 million that downloaded it from Stardock are actually using the program/application.
Now my point is not to argue that eight-million people did not download one of the dozen different Start Menu applications, but how many of that eight-million downloaded all of the dozen Start Menu Applications in order to determined which of those they would like best.
I can say up front that I have downloaded at least six of them, and even though at present I am not using any of them still I have Classic Shell (Free) loaded onto my win 8 computer just in case there may be a need for it. . .never know.
Also, a good deal of the computer manufacture include something they have come up with just in case their users require or want a start menu over the start screen. My new HP has a built in start menu all that needs to be done is turn it on (did, and it wasn't all that great).
A good deal of the GUI changing applications available for win 8 comes preloaded with Classic Shell Free. The people at Classic Shell Free have given these third party developers permission to use their product (think that is just great).