Yes, and making a tool that's so counter intuitive that most users find it a confusing mess is a bad idea.
In every place I've worked, a major project has been replacing a grey forms application with every screen so stuffed with information even users who sit and use the software every day are confused by it.
> In every place I've worked, a major project has been replacing a grey forms application with every screen so stuffed with information even users who sit and use the software every day are confused by it.
That's just one big exercise in burning money. The end result of these major projects is software that is significantly less efficient to use.
Information density is good. Seamlessly filtering out irrelevant things and focusing on important ones, and switching these filters on the fly, is the one thing human visual system is good at. Information density plays to our natural strengths. Meanwhile, our working memory is limited, so splitting things into multiple screens plays into our weaknesses.
When you replace an information- and functionality-rich screen with a bunch of sparse screens connected by buttons, doing everything takes longer - there's extra operations, a switch delay in the UI, and working memory delays. This scales with use - so when talking about software used every day by salaried employees, that's literally setting company dollars on fire. People do their jobs slower, doing less work, getting increasingly frustrated, wasting time they could spend on something else[0]. It's hard to see such major projects as anything else than sabotage.
Yes, information-dense software has steeper learning curve. But that's a solved problem - people using such software at work are usually trained in using it. They get leveled-up to proficient very fast. Information-sparse software doesn't even offer the option of becoming a proficient user, because there's nothing to skill up in (except patience for loading screens).
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[0] - or watching cat videos, or doing personal stuff, or chilling out - ways of keeping sane and improving morale, which raises overall productivity too.
Don't blame the hammers when you find your valuables shattered. Blame the people wielding the hammers.
WinForms can only do what they're told, and they can only look how they're designed to look. Blame the people creating the user interfaces that suck instead of the tool they chose to use to build the bad UI. It isn't the UI's fault.
The absolute best and most useful user interfaces that I have ever used were windows forms. They were designed my people who understood how their program was to be used by its users, and who understood what information a user needs at any point in the workflow.
I'm pretty sure that it doesn't matter how nice your form library is, businesses and government will find a way to make it ugly and overstuffed with fields and buttons. The funny part is the team that did the winforms project was replacing horrible some horrible text-mode database form that users said all the same things about.
In every place I've worked, a major project has been replacing a grey forms application with every screen so stuffed with information even users who sit and use the software every day are confused by it.
It is always win 2000 forms.