It might be powerful, but if something goes wrong it’s impossible to debug. That alone negates all of its advantages to me. I don’t like magic I can’t debug or see source code for.

> WPF is like having a monoid in the category of endofunctors for UI programming.

Takeaway: I will start using WPF right after I get a solid grasp on category theory. That will happen "very soon".

I don't know any of that terminology or category theory in general, but I'd like to assure anyone who cares that you really don't have to to get the elegance and power of WPF. It was a steep learning curve sure, but totally worth it. As far as visual control, elegance, and development-pleasure, I think it far surpasses WinForms, the Android UI toolkit, Cocoa, and the web stack. (Though XAML is annoyingly verbose.)

The only reason I stay away is because of the performance issues, and the opaque ways in which performance degrades.