That was always my biggest disappointment with Delphi. Things that were simple, free, and of very high quality in other languages would lead you into a thicket

That was always my biggest disappointment with Delphi. Things that were simple, free, and of very high quality in other languages would lead you into a thicket of shady, low quality nagware VCL components that had a tangle restrictions on use and usually a magic DLL blob you were then forced to distribute along with your app. It was a constant infuriating disappointment. Delphi should have been so much more.