Yeah, I'm not really arguing that it doesn't work. There are definitely use cases for it. The main thing is that the simplicity is a facade. Generally it's achieved by limiting scope. But as the scope creeps upwards, the complexity of the machinery starts to overtake the complexity of the problem. The biggest issue is that there is a considerable amount of technical lock-in. The solution is so specific that it becomes impossible to change your mind later in the project. Techniques like refactoring are impossible because you've already baked in the subsystem decomposition early, early in the process. The whole thing becomes a brittle mess. But for certain problems (or putting up a quick MVP that you might throw away later), it can be very useful. And as you said, it can be an excellent way to build projects of limited scope with people who are heavy on domain knowledge, but light on programming expertise.
There isn't anything intrinsic to the Visual Studio/WinForms or Delphi/VCL environments that prevents you from refactoring an application into a more structured manner as it grows. They simply don't shoehorn you into an enterprise development model for applications that don't require it (or don't require it initially). Thousands upon thousands of large business applications have been written in both, so obviously they were perfectly manageable for that purpose (2-tier, N-tier, web back-end). The point is to create reliable software that satisfies your business needs. One company that I'm familiar with built a beautiful application server/front-end UI in Delphi that uses SQL Server as the database server and serves 160+ concurrent users every day. The front-end UI was a ~16MB .exe, and the application server was a ~8MB .exe, both with no dependencies other than using Windows Vista or higher as the target OS. It was a very impressive application (I wish I had wrote it), and served the ~$45mil company very well.
