[vnorilo]

Similarly to many MS technologies from that era, WPF/XAML is not half bad at the core, but so verbose. Probably intended to be primarily generated by tooling.

[pjmlp]

Having been a Turbo Vision and OWL user, which lacked UI designer support, following up with VB and Delphi/C++ Builder, I never understood the macho attitude of doing GUI design manually without tooling support.

Any framework that comes with tooling support out of box is a plus for me.

Hence in what concerns Web, I care mostly about WebComponents, CMS middleware with page designers and SPA frameworks like Angular.

[vnorilo]

For me, there's nothing macho about it, more like weary resignation when said tools cannot do what needs to be done. I have never used delphi though.

[barrkel]

I reckon for designers are excellent for forms. The further you go beyond a data crud app, the less benefit you get from visual designers, because more stuff will be animated, contextual, custom, etc.

CRUD apps is a really big application space to cede, though, I totally think tooling is worth it.