What I remember most fondly about the Borland stack was how well it abstracted away all the messy Windows 3.x and 95 UI code and made working professionally as a Windows dev much less stressful.

Also, for a time, it totally blew away MS Visual C, although the VCL was hella inconsistent, and that was rather maddening at times.

To be at max productivity you had to scour the web looking for snippets that showed you how to, say, add strings to this widget or draw on that canvas.

The RAD implementation was rather brilliant, and for several years at least blew its main competitor, Visual Basic (ugh) totally out of the water.