Yes, the cost is ridiculous. Delphi used to be an affordable tool. I've been a big fan of Delphi and would still be developing Windows apps in Delphi, except for the excessive pricing. Stopped renewing my licenses two years ago.

Delphi had the flexibility of Visual Basic without the deployment problems.

Unlike VB, all the controls and libraries were written in Delphi itself, which allowed you to walk through each and every library when debugging problems.