Yup. I remember 4 or 5 different frameworks that were supposed to be the future of native UI on windows, but each one after WinForms was harder to use, slower, and less capable than what came before.

I disagree, WPF is quite good to use, and WinForms approach to keeping UI as code is quite moronic. I would say WPF is where it should've stopped.

WPF sucks. I rather like expressing the UI in code. Having to deal with so much XML (XaML) is annoying as fuck.

The workflow on WPF was so much more painful than winforms, which had a decent WYSIWYG designer and solid integration with visual studio.

WPF in comparison was slow, memory hungry, and difficult to learn.

I tried 5 times to make a WPF application but it didn’t even have all the same basic controls that WinForms supported.

nah WPF made way more sense than WinForm in its abstract design, as it supported flow/stack layout ideas instead of anchors like WinForm did. WinForm was much quicker to get started but had a fundamental flaw in that it couldn't really do transparency.

>and spent about a decade and half creating a replacement

I often feels modern Apple is the same. I mean we are 10 years into Swift, 6 years into Swift UI.

And it feels they are still in beta.

And yet it feels more polished than WinUI, that is how bad it has gotten.