WinBox3 being "retired" is a product management decision... no point on arguing what/if AI could do or how hard it is, or the potential prompts. MikroTik decides if the company wants to commit to maintaining compatibility, since it not just "an employee" getting code that works... its support, docs, and importantly testing too that are effected. At this point, that decision is WB3 ends. It's not that hard/easy... it's a business decision.
Well, the patched WB3s have some attributes that don't work. If MikroTik released a WinBox that wasn't perfect... there be support cases, complaints on forum... So it's not a free lunch, AI or not.
My bet is they have more substantial changes plan in how WinBox gets data from RouterOS, that might be more radically different. For example,
- WinBox protocol uses EC-SRP encryption, and requires a user/password as only auth mechanism. It uses SHA1 internally, so its NOT particular hardened for the dark ages of security we're going be seeing.
- Adding newer auth schemes like more-direct 2FA support, Passkey (really just mTLS certs wrapped in protocol), fine-grain access tokens, or any other auth scheme... that be new UI in two places.
- IDK the exact internals on the UI parts of winbox, yet. But high-level RouterOS provide much of the UI structures.... so if routeros could know all clients were at min WinBox version and always be Qt-based, it could be further streamlined to be more efficient to provide Qt the QML metadata it needs...
- Related, some of the data needed for WinBox3, may use space, that could be saved or optimized. Potentially slightly reducing NPK size.
So yes if they added new things, they could be implemented on WinBox3. But no escaping it double work on an on-going basis. And make fixing the bigger thing harder or slower.