totally understand that kind of pain : actively thinking about writing driver primitives to shim into the ui library layers to get the eventual sensibility we need.

I've spent a inordinate amount of time on figuring out how to hire a truly dedicated windows native interface team and the only solid conclusion that I've come to is it's necessary to also recruit to write tooling for the designers to work with. we have a application that happily doesn't need a gui but to be used widely needs a excellent gui. it looks like we'll need at least as many people on interface as for our core application. the tooling, oh the tooling..