WPF is, by far, the most pleasant and flexible thick client, windowing system out there. XAML is a bit verbose, but the binding capabilities combined with an open source MVVM framework like Caliburn allow you to build extremely flexible UIs.

WPF also abstracts control behavior away from presentation and allows you to easily and quickly extend the base set of controls to do whatever you want to.

After building multiple thick client applications using VB6, MFC, Swign, Winforms and WPF, WPF exceeds all of these, by far, in flexibility and maintainability.

Also <grid> (as a sane alternative to <div class="table">) where you can actually align stuff exactly the way you want.

You know about flex box right?

Microsoft should have bought Qt when they acquired Nokia. So they have an alternative for cross platform desktop development.

This makes sense , Microsoft does not support C for user space development , and Qt/C++ is good way to push C out from user space development in all platform's .

It wasn't there anymore, Nokia sold it's Qt business to Digia quite soon after the 2011 announcement of Windows Phone strategy.

I find the binding part and MVVM stuff rubbish.

For me, the real value is composition flexibility.