Funny enough it has gone the other way round for me. Talking from Winforms perspective, the code generated by the designer is quite noisy, with maybe a quarter or half of all the property settings really necessary. Making pretty big controls is also more of a temptation when working with a designer. Changing some hierarchy of controls in the Winforms designer is quite a nightmare in my eyes.
In my last project I have created additional APIs to set up splitters in forms, dockmanagers, menus, toolbars etc. in a declarative fashion. These are such that they will further enforce separation of concerns.
I also try to rely much more on auto-layout features which admittedly are a lot nicer in WPF but can also go some way in Windows Forms.
