I think this explains ETW's horribleness pretty well:
> Now, normally, a game developer would have no reason to use the Event Tracing for Windows API directly. You can use tools like PerfMon to view logged information about your game, like how much working set it was using or how much disk I/O it did. But there is one specific thing that directly accessing Event Tracing gives you that you can’t get anywhere else: context switch timing.
It's been awhile since I've run wpa and wpr but I thought you got context switch timing these days with the built in tools such that there's no need to do it yourself. IMO having a good ETW API is probably low ROI.
There's also been xperf and Process Monitor for a long time. It's not clear to me from the article why they needed to use the underlying API instead of the tooling built on top.
> Now, normally, a game developer would have no reason to use the Event Tracing for Windows API directly. You can use tools like PerfMon to view logged information about your game, like how much working set it was using or how much disk I/O it did. But there is one specific thing that directly accessing Event Tracing gives you that you can’t get anywhere else: context switch timing.
It's been awhile since I've run wpa and wpr but I thought you got context switch timing these days with the built in tools such that there's no need to do it yourself. IMO having a good ETW API is probably low ROI.