> A lot of babies got thrown out with the COM+/VB6/MFC bathwater.
Not sure what you mean here, COM has become the main way of doing Windows APIs since Vista, going full circle to the original design of COM Runtime with WinRT (now UWP).
I was referring to the APIs, components, and language experience that got recycled incompletely as they were ported into .Net and "abstracted away", moreso than how components are marshaled :)
COMs resilience in the face of competing models, as you've pointed out, and the fractured GUI landscape of the windows client platform are symptoms, IMO, of ceding a pretty mature platform for something almost, but not quite, as capable. It has taken .Net over a decade to relearn lessons won painfully for the VB5 and VB6 teams, and I believe they lost a lot of larger systems because of WinForms restrictions in the 2005-2009 window.
Not sure what you mean here, COM has become the main way of doing Windows APIs since Vista, going full circle to the original design of COM Runtime with WinRT (now UWP).