The transition from Silverlight/XNA to WinRT pissed many developers, specially since WP 8 forced everyone into asynchronous programming model, with no consistent APIs between mobile and store models.
WP 8.1 improved the situation with the shared code and PCLs, but it still required two code bases for the UI.
Also forcing everyone to write code for handling application state that should be part of WinRT didn't help.
On my case, I got a Lumia 630 to play around with C++/CX, thinking about the good old C++ Builder days, but even with WP 8.1 UAP, one gets fed up to write something multiple times for the same OS.
WP 8.1 improved the situation with the shared code and PCLs, but it still required two code bases for the UI.
Also forcing everyone to write code for handling application state that should be part of WinRT didn't help.
On my case, I got a Lumia 630 to play around with C++/CX, thinking about the good old C++ Builder days, but even with WP 8.1 UAP, one gets fed up to write something multiple times for the same OS.