Sad, but so true. It’s a Greek tragedy.

The only thing that gave me pause with your argument is the ongoing trend towards the web. The kind of mission-critical, high-performance apps you’re talking about (e.g. trading floor, scientific computing, engineering and automation) aren’t going to the web any time soon; but as the millions of other enterprise apps do migrate towards the web for ease of deployment and maintenance, there’s less and less financial opportunity for Microsoft (or others) to further invest in a desktop framework.

Unfortunately, WPF is creaking — it was left behind on DirectX 9, as you know. If you were starting a new enterprise-class app tomorrow that had a ten year life span, would you feel comfortable to use it?

(Full disclosure — I left Microsoft for Google for the kind of reasons you relate, and am now working on Flutter, which is the mobile SDK that offers the cool hot reload feature you mentioned.)