It does but as you say due to the emperor's new clothes every few years, the loyalty isn't there now. I know of no companies doing greenfield desktop dev that are using any of their tech. It's all Qt, CEF, python/wx and JavaFX. Even the financial companies we deal with who were pretty heavy with the WPF are canning it next cycle.
Incumbent MFC, Winforms and WPF stuff will live as long as VB6 did (and still does) though.
Edit as HN won't let me reply (submitting too fast). In Europe and JavaFX also has hardware acceleration as does CEF as it uses Chrome's rendering engine.
Yep definitely the worst thing ever. Not just that though; everything. I've lost so much hair in the last few months over trying to get a CD environment up on windows.
Although when I went through school, A level mathematics didn't even touch anything past polynomials and physics didn't go much past classical mechanics and energy. Now they're all over calculus and quantum mechanics!
Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell's start menu is the sweet spot at the moment if you ask me. It has the explorer and task manager additions that windows 8 brought in, boots faster than 7 and doesn't have as much of the UI replaced. I'm going to be honest and say that if there was a way to get rid of the charms bar and network panel, it'd be perfect.
TBH I'm going to use it until EOL in 2023 and then do something else.