Yeah, seriously - it's ugly and quirky but generally all the settings you care about are there and I don't have to click through 15 different levels of menus or look things up in the wiki for the proper cli invocation when I need to tweak something.

Exactly, I can think of very few tools/apps that are as effective and powerful as winbox. Not to mention that the entire program is portable and around a few megabytes in size)

For probably the past 10 to 15 years there has not been a moment that I haven’t had at least two winbox sessions open/running on my daily desktop 24/7. (Network/Wi-Fi admin , responsible for thousands of devices)

The kind of sad thing is that you could style forms/controls in VB6 so apps didn't have to look that way.