OWL was really ahead of its time.

Yeah, besides the current offerings from VCL and FireMonkey, only Qt compares to it in terms of existing C++ frameworks.

History rumor hill goes that originally MFC was just as high level, the origin of Afx prefix, however internal teams were opposed to it and hence how MFC became a very thin layer over Win32.

History repeated itself with C++/CX, finally Microsoft had something comparable to C++ Builder, and internal teams weren't happy until they sabotaged the whole effort with C++/WinRT. Now outside Windows team no one cares.

The development experience with OWL, on Windows 3.1 was great, I never bothered with raw Win16 or Win32 other that learning the foundations, or adding support for missing capabilities, at the TP, Delphi, C++ frameworks.