I hear what you're saying, and I agree that MS could have done much more to allow consistent theming by the user. But, I also know that even a beginner WPF tutorial shows how to arbitrarily adjust controls with a resource dictionary. Meanwhile, I don't recall ever learning how to change the color of a win32/c++ button short of taking over the entire drawing responsibility (I'm sure it's possible but that's beside the point). So as a result of that emphasis, it seems to me a lot more WPF/UWP apps use arbitrary non-standard colors/fonts/highlights/animations, which would be completely at odds with user-selected themes. I know mine did, anyway, so I guess I was part of the problem!