Is there a particular reason Windows 95 was deliberately not back-compatible?

After some hard drive reconstruction as a result of the joke.blusod worm not being so "low" threat as advertised, and since I dual-boot with MS-DOS 6.22 I thought it was time to stop having to read G:\PROGRA~1.

So imagine the mind-blowing shock when I suddenly noticed yesterday that PROGRAMS is an eight-letter word, and therefore fits just fine into the 8.3 naming system.

Now surely some Microsoft engineers in 1994 could have figured this out from scratch, and stopped having 16-bit programs having to deal with 255-character directory names fresh out of the gate.

(Bonus Windows hacking blog entry featuring hot cleavage)