tell me you never use platform-provided or third party libraries without actually telling me.

I won't, because obviously I have. Coincidentally, I've just spent more than a day to find a sane way to setup basic windowing and rendering on Windows for the 1000st time -- this time based on Direct3D compute shader and DirectComposition. Going to integrate the Direct2D/DirectWrite backend of my UI library with those technologies in a bit.

And I'm working on this project because the material removal simulation library that my company has been paying insane amounts of money for in the last 10 years just doesn't "cut" it for our grinding purposes (independently of the cruelfully bad C++ API, and the ~10x worse performance in their debug build because of all those dumb C++ objects inside), and it requires an insane amount of BS architecture around on our part to even use it, so I've concluded (after my own short periods of serious well-meaning suffering with this library on and off during the last 2 years), it should actually be way easier to make our own grinding simulation in a short time after running the numbers and concluding a realistic magnitude.

Guess what, I still see no reason why my little project shouldn't succeed, I've seriously come closer to realizing it, but COM Objects by Microsoft are once again not the reason why that is so. On the contrary, they are annoying to use (I'm not a newcomer to them), even though there are a lot of nice things to say about Microsoft APIs as well (and OpenGL should just die), it seems like a layer of bullshit to wade through for no obvious reason.

The nicest libraries in terms of usability have always been those with a simple & straightforward plain C interface.