I agree you can avoid a lot of headaches by not using platform specific tools. Unfortunately, once you get into users wanting OS specific feature support, all

I agree you can avoid a lot of headaches by not using platform specific tools. Unfortunately, once you get into users wanting OS specific feature support, all that goes out the window. You now are forced to maintain multiple versions of your product that differ greatly per operating system. Pair that with the fact the codebase was almost 20 years old, you get some fun legacy code support issues that a lot of C++ projects naturally have due to the fact that C++ is not a new language.