Last time I wrote in MFC was about five years ago. As I recall, I got up to speed by reading a couple books which went over basic application design stuff in Win32.
Didn't seem too bad to me -- I even did some COM stuff and some hooks and such. But like I said, that was a while ago. I wasn't a crazy fan or anything, but the tools did the work I wanted to do.
Talk about a black hole of tool-chain hell...
You can go with a lightweight (?!?!) framework around your API, a la MFC, or more of a true framework, like OWL. But in either case, comparing a what? 12-year old framework system with something more recent isn't exactly apples and apples.
I'm not trying to make excuses but heck, the whole reason we grow new frameworks is because old ones get too bloated and brittle.
Rock on with Boost, but don't compare apples and oranges. Maybe it's me, but professionals are supposed to know the hard-to-use crap and should be able to swim around in that stuff like a fish in water.
Hey -- just my two cents. No matter how you cut it, C++ is a killer language when it comes to complexity -- and that's without the freaking frameworks!
Modern C++ done "the boost way" is a great language. I have rewritten perl prototypes in modern C++ with hardly any code expansion, but with huge performance and deployability gains.
I've been having to work in MFC recently for a client, and boy...
If you ever needed a reminder why some people dislike C++ so much, just work with MFC. It's one of the worst bastardizations of C++ I've ever seen (of course, to be fair, one has to admit that much of the really sucky stuff in MFC was done before the C++ standards were very good, and long before the compilers caught up).
Writing C++ using std:: and boost:: and other libraries written in "Modern C++" is pure bliss compared to doing it the "Microsoft Way".