Oh I'm certainly not conceeding that Linux as a whole is better than Windows - there are pros and cons to each. But I've found that writing console applications

Oh I'm certainly not conceeding that Linux as a whole is better than Windows - there are pros and cons to each. But I've found that writing console applications with VT sequences to be a generally preferable experience to the Console API. Now that we've added support for VT sequences, writing a cross-platform commandline application is pretty trivial - just use VT on every platform. I feel you pain with the CRT, though I agree with the sibling comment, the uCRT is a way better experience. I know there is a team of pretty talented people working on that, but I think way below the level that's able to influence the allocation of developer resources - otherwise the console would have a lot more than 3 people on it :P