For win32 by all means use Turbo Delphi. The Lazarus community is small so the less people to support the better.
This is an amazingly irresponsible comment.
Why irresponsible? I think for win32, Turbo Delphi is the better choice, create by maybe 10 fold the number of developers as Lazarus and although I never used Turbo Delphi, I think its quality is equal or maybe better than Lazarus's . And although Delphi's community is decreasing and Lazarus's comunity is growing, I think Delphi's community is still bigger. These two assumptions (I first wrote facts here) make me say, that for win32, Turbo Delphi is a better choice, certainly, if you are still in doubt.
Do others here really share this attitude?
No, idea. I hope others will respond here too, so you get a balenced view.
Do you really want FP and Lazarus to get the same secret society/cult like reputation that C and Unix started with? (And still haunts those btw.)
I never heard that part of the history. Unfortunately it didn't help killing C (let's do some C-bashing for a change) and unix like OS-es (Linux, Mac OS X) are still with us too.
If you tell your user base to "go away" they may very well do that and not come back. Then FP/Lazarus might end up being a historical Wikipedia entry of something that was tried but failed.
As long as I don't scare away contributors, I don't mind. :-) Lazarus, in the first place needs contributors to survive, not users. Even if nobody except 5 Lazarus developers, use Lazarus, Lazarus will survive.
This may change if there is a Lazarus / FPC Foundation and we grow dependant on users. Fortunately this is not the case yet.