Up through Windows 7, control panels all looked like this:
These are built with the old Windows MFC (Microsoft Foundational Classes) C/C++ interfaces. They've been around since basically Windows 3.x, having been dragged along kicking and screaming into the 32-bit world. Admittedly they have some serious shortcomings -- they've never been ported to 64-bit (so anything using these interfaces must run on the "Windows-on-Windows" (WOW) mechanism), they don't support high-DPI displays (so you get that fun "blurry" look to older applications when you run them on 1080p or higher resolutions).
Even before this current problem arose, MS had an existing problem even as recently as Windows XP: a lot of the knowledgeable people who wrote MFC (or at least used it) had long since left the company, and there was a real deficit of people who could still work with it. There were plenty of places where code for each dialog box was just copy-pasted verbatim to add another control (checkbox, dropdown, whatever) because the dev didn't know how to do it "right". It was getting ugly and unmaintainable.
"There Must Be a Better Way!" thought the brilliant engineers at Microsoft. Several "Better Ways" were developed, including WinForms, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), UWP (Universal Windows Platform) and others. Being the products of brilliant Microsoft engineers, none of these Better Ways were feature-complete, backwards-compatible or even cross-compatible mechanisms for building user interfaces. As you can imagine from the names, there was all sorts of feature creep -- WinForms was generally intended for UIs, while "Universal Windows Platform" includes all sorts of shit to mimic Java's "write once run nowhere" functionality to let programs target UWP, which then runs on multiple Windows-only systems (Xbox, PC, Windows tablets, etc.).
As for how the modern Windows 11 control panels evolved to be such dogshit, so the story goes (from an insider at Microsoft)... the higher-ups were deciding how they wanted the updated Windows control panels to look. Obviously they had to be reimplemented basically from scratch using the newer toolkits since the old MFC stuff had to go away. So these brilliant managers and directors -- having no clue how to develop software or design an effective UI -- made mockups of their ideas in plain ol' Powerpoint.
This would have been okay (since this would just convey the "gist" of it to graphic and UX designers who would refine it and make it user-friendly and functional, right?) except that the management decided to mandate "this is how it needs to look ... EXACTLY like this, no changes, no twists, just make it look EXACTLY LIKE THIS!" In comes the army of loyal pajeets, who dutifully recreated those panels exactly how their overlords directed, and that led to the abomination that is the modern-day Windows control panel UI.
Just one problem. There's a
lot of old-school dialogs in Windows. Many of them hooked into deep, dark places under the hood in the Windows kernel or at least inside services or the nasty-ass registry. There were also hard deadlines. So not only did the pajeets always (often) know how to make their fancy (ugly) new UI elements actually
effect the changes they were supposed to when used, they were under intense time pressure to get as much done as possible in the time they had.
The end result? Windows 8 shipped with that horrific blend of old-style dialogs and a handful of "new," bland and dreadful looking "modern" control panel UIs. With each subsequent release of Windows, including the semi-annual major releases, they've slowly been patching out the old panels with newly-implemented modern ones. This means they've pissed away more than a decade of engineering time trying to phase out these fucking things, and they're still nowhere near finished.
And even when they
do finish with those things, they've still got this MDI-based monstrosity "pattern" to do away with:
Event Viewer, Hyper-V Manager and at least a few other core components still use this barbaric pattern, and are in desperate need of overhauls, but I weep when I think about what the higher-ups and their pajeet army will do to these old dogs.
