Sadly, Embarcadero's chokehold on Delphi is what turned me off of it back then, and still does nowadays. You could argue FreePascal/Lazarus is an alternative, but it's really not the same.
Agreed, I feel like the only real problem with Delphi was/is Embarcadero, at least for many years after Borland exited the picture.
While one can argue about the pricing structure, the problem for me was that how they act and communicate never felt in any way professional, at least up until I left Delphi completely, it might have changed.
Even today, more than a decade later, their website retains the same feeling of being built by the lowest bidder, seemingly without even hiring a translator/copy writer that has command of English.
All of which feels super strange when you peddle a product for thousands of dollars.
I have never seen anything better than Delphi and the VCL for building simple and easily deployed Windows apps,
most everything fails on that second part. While it's a pity events took the turns they did, it's quite astonishing that MS and all their competitors never managed to find a way to easily and robustly deploy simple applications without the need for running an installer or using complicated runtimes.
