It's worse than bare maintenance, MS may have entered the stage of "clueless breaking" probably for the same reasons outlined above (newcomers don't understand what came before them).
The following is an account as an end-user. It is an old Win32 program from the 90s. Remember the theme styling controls from Desktop->Properties etc? For example you could change the white Control background to something else. Even if it never worked well enough everywhere, it was supported by native Controls. And in this application too. Recently the developer must have migrated the app to a new SDK (I guess). Not only did the clickable buttons lose all their borders, making them harder to eye-track, but all those native Controls? Lost their legacy theming support. Changing the background color no longer applies in the new version, it remains white.
And that's unlikely developer's own work. I assume the SDK adheres to newer guidelines itself.
The following is an account as an end-user. It is an old Win32 program from the 90s. Remember the theme styling controls from Desktop->Properties etc? For example you could change the white Control background to something else. Even if it never worked well enough everywhere, it was supported by native Controls. And in this application too. Recently the developer must have migrated the app to a new SDK (I guess). Not only did the clickable buttons lose all their borders, making them harder to eye-track, but all those native Controls? Lost their legacy theming support. Changing the background color no longer applies in the new version, it remains white.
And that's unlikely developer's own work. I assume the SDK adheres to newer guidelines itself.