Agreed. Cocoa is the most productive environment for desktop development. It is unrivaled.
But man, seeing objc and comparing it with its peers across multiple decades... In a world where most people were doing C++ and doing it badly[1], or doing Java and doing it badly, it was very eye-opening to see this tiny little runtime that adds objects to C and doesn't do a bad job of it.
[1] and I'm talking the pre-STL, pre-C++11 at that.