No, because I'm actually saying the reverse of what you think I'm saying. I believe Cocoa tends to operate below the level of typical Windows APIs -- low enough

No, because I'm actually saying the reverse of what you think I'm saying. I believe Cocoa tends to operate below the level of typical Windows APIs -- low enough to have complete control over the UX but high enough to make things that ought to be easy, easy. Windows tends to be friendly for lousy developers (typical systems integrators, of whom I have a great deal of experience). At a very low level it doesn't make much of a difference -- good coders will deal with the hand they are given. I think you can make a case for selection bias in that Mac development (the old Mac OS toolbox now called "Carbon" and Cocoa today) is too difficult for hacks which filters out a lot of the crap that people who can cobble together junk using Visual Basic or whatever. (There used to be a website devoted to really awful Mac apps, most of which were built using Realbasic, but lousy Realbasic apps are cross-platform :-) )