Keith, I wouldn’t waste time on feeling you have disappointed ‘so many people’.
Truth is a smallish number do seem to be vocally not understanding the realities of a small company developing a complex solution.
Like everyone I would have loved an iOS version 2 years earlier, yet did understand your predicament, just as I (and I believe the vast majority) understand the reality of your team developing Win V3.
MS have not developed a Scrivener equiv, a because the potential market is too small for their development structure, and b, because they are not ‘writers’ developing a specialised product that focusses what a specific market needs to (almost) perfection. The Scrivener type solution can only be perfected by that tightly focussed small team IMHO
Windows has a very powerful ListView control of its own, which I found quite easy to populate from the ScrivX binder file via AutoHotKey. You can see the control in any number of Windows utilities; it powers the column sorts and multi-selects in File Explorer and the collapsible levels in Task Manager. It’s built in, available for anyone programming for Windows.
Like JimRac, I needed to sort the Binder entries by date. Not for a narrative timeline, but for a view of the docs I’d been working on most recently. Without that capability, I would not have stuck with Scrivener.
I’m pretty sure the decision to prefer Qt controls stemmed from the desire to make a cross-platform Scrivener and the ease of working out of a single box, rather than from any shortcoming in the corresponding Windows tools.
There was never any need to use Qt for cross-platform support, given that the Mac version already existed (although it will perhaps make an Android version easier one day). My understanding is that Lee chose Qt because it offered the most flexibility. I have seen other developers lament the state of Windows tools because there have been so many APIs that have been introduced and then half-abandoned or replaced. I’m no expert on that, though, being the Mac dev - Lee would be better placed to comment on that. I thought Qt called through to native tools anyway, but may well be wrong on that…
Obviously way too late now, but if not for cross-platform reasons, why wasn’t .NET used? It could have made feature parity with the Cocoa version easier. It’s certainly nicer to program in if you’re just focusing on Windows.