I'm amazed how much MS is failing with the MSI. You'd expect that in Visual Studio (the proper one, not code) there would be a simple way to say: this project - compile it and stick into MSI with just bare defaults. But no, you essentially have to get a third party thing to manage creating that for you, and even those involve custom scripting that requires another custom generator on top to get the list of files to install (looking at you, Vix). And no, the publish to Azure or ClickOnce are not reasonable options.

VB5 came with a built in installer generator - how did we regress from there?