For me it was the opposite. Raw Win32 is low level: you manipulate the event loop directly, and you have to deal with the layout yourself, but otherwise rather

For me it was the opposite. Raw Win32 is low level: you manipulate the event loop directly, and you have to deal with the layout yourself, but otherwise rather simple. MFC had a mix of generated code and handwritten code. Writing MFC code by hand was hell, and using a graphical IDE was nowhere as convenient as Visual Basic or anything by Borland.