Once you move to making mobile or desktop front end you appreciate how easy front end web dev really is.
Contrary to popular opinion I think the DOM, HTML, and CSS, are an awesome way of defining and styling a scene graph. When I did some C++ front end I missed them every day.
They are good if one likes to write boilerplate with lots of C style coding in a C++ application.
MFC always suffered from not being as high level as OWL or VCL, because the internal devs at Microsoft thought that Afx (the original implementation) was too high level.
By WTF, I think you actually mean WTL, which is based on ATL, full of templates and low level COM style programming. Another one that gives no pleasure using.
WinAPI was already out of fashion on the Win16 bit days, I was already using Turbo/Borland C++ with OWL on those days.
The only reason to use Win16 directly was to wrap APIs not exposed to OWL.
Sadly due to how Borland got themselves mismanaged, OWL lost to MFC in the early 32 bit days, and only enterprise customers with deep pockets adopted C++ Builder with VCL, which allows for VB/Delphi style programming with C++.
Contrary to popular opinion I think the DOM, HTML, and CSS, are an awesome way of defining and styling a scene graph. When I did some C++ front end I missed them every day.