To add to the already wonderful information in this thread:
NTFS is still a proprietary format which Microsoft is very reluctant to share too much information on how it all really works inside. So, any interoperability has had to come from reverse engineering and trial and error. So, once upon a time you could seriously foul up your NTFS partition trying to modify it from Linux. Naturally there are still people out there who shy away from this sort of thing.