How many abandoned attempts do you feel the Microsoft mobile developer ecosytem could take before losing all faith in yet another MS mobile strategy?

In the mobile space, there was no market for just Windows Phone apps. You needed to support native Android and iOS already. WP was just another burden without a clear return.

In their desperation they started paying college students for developing apps for the platform, leading to low quality experiences.

They pushed WP hard to their channel. Many employees in MS system integrators and managed services got very cheap phones, but outside that group, just nobody bought them before in the end they started dumping them to the masses as cheapest phone in the store, but there ain't no serious market there either.

It was about 10% in Europe when they killed it, many people that could not go for Apple due to their prices where actually going for Windows Phone, because the native code (WinRT/.NET Native/C++/CX), provided a much better experience in low end phones than Dalvik with its lousy JIT was capable of at the time.

I was one of them, initially getting a Lumia as second phone even though as ex-Nokia I was kind of pissed off, developing for UAP/UWP grew on me and was much more fun than dealing with Android.

Now given how Microsoft has messed up the whole UWP, Project Reunion and WinUI/WinAppSDK I would assert there is no faith left.