MicrosoftThank you for bringing this up. I hope that your conclusion is not true. WAC is an incredibly valuable tool which has even much better potential. If Microsoft would decide to stop the development, not only it would have been a large amount of wasted dev and partner customer time (feedback), but also this would leave us as partners and customers with no GUI tool as all GUI / RSAT tools are no longer under development since 2012 at least. They have a lot of restrictions, issues, and missing features. Which means, everything needs to be done with these or PowerShell which is not everyone’s gusto, especially in small and medium businesses.
I can understand your question very well, since the promotion of WAC from the MVPs and Microsoft on social media and TechCommunity is not large.
Only very few MS Docs articles mention WAC or include updated screenshots / manuals on how to usual admin / implementation tasks using WAC. This could have completely different reasons like limited time of the content team belonging to docs.
Imho the WAC Team should try to get more attention using the well-known communication channels.
WAC still is not widely known at customers on-premises.
Hiding it for registration in the evaluation area, isn't helpful. This preview needs an insider account per design.
The bar to download and implement it is comparatively high. As an example one could still download an old SharePoint 2013 SP1 foundation server with none of these restrictions.
Promotion of WAC, and active development on current constrains bring it up par or better surpass the legacy GUI tools has a high priority imho.
WAC is actively promoted by Server Manager and Failover Clustermanagement Console for many years now on startup of these tools, still missing very important features in the same areas where it pretends to deliver.
The main dev time was spent into Azure and leverage tools for all Azure Services / Azure ARC and especially Azure Stack HCI, certainly to make adoption easier than using PowerShell only, and boost sales.
I won't rate the success of this route but want to cite Jeff-Woolsey that the strategy is hybrid, not cloud only and that should reflect to improve WAC in terms of feature equality and more for on-premises GUI tools which are technically dormant for nearly a decade now.
Compared to 2019 WAC has improved a lot, contrary due to needed triage decisions some items are untouched since.
If the WAC PM plane needs arguments for getting more dev capacities in the next fiscal quarter or FY I could bring up some from the perspective of Microsoft customers and integrators.
WAC, imho, isn't just a vehicle to reach Azure consumption, but should be a universal tool to end the multi-tool approach of the past to make Microsoft products configurable and accessible, especially if want to push further with Windows Server Core, centralized management, for security and other reasons.
tl:dr:
Please promote WAC more why it is better than traditional tools - potentially why these need to go away (RPC, WMIC etc), also across social media, TechCommunity, having MVPs using it actively in (usergroups, demos, labs, community events, blogs – they rather stick with PowerShell for scalability and efficiency, not everyone out there wants to be a DevOps) and focus to bring it up to par or better than the old tools.
Just my 2 cents.
