It really depends on when. If we're talking Win9x-XP, shells could do everything, and Explorer wasn't really special. From Vista onwards, things started to get "more special", and Win8+ especially killed many old extensibility points.
Curious why you feel that way, when they were all generally cloned linux shells [sic] anyway? eg: blackbox <> openbox (now xoblite), or litestep <> afterstep/nextstep?
I guess it was a bit more punk to break windows, from some perspectives.
Nostalgic to visit the LiteStep website, looks largely unchanged from when I stumbled across it probably circa 2003. I always enjoyed the crispness of the menu chrome and icons from what I always associated with a "BeOS style".
NONE of them were fully usable the way explorer was, but it was still fun.