[mhd]

While I think those "German engineering" cliches are rather tired (and wrong, cf. Dieter Rams influence on Apple products), I don't see a big difference regarding complexity between Cappuccino and Qooxdoo regarding complexity. Both seem to embrace the desktop paradigm, both have an API that's close to traditional GUIs (very close in the case of Cappuccino).

(And it's not really that much easier getting graphics-intensive stuff done in Cappuccino, compared to something like Raphaël.)

Cappuccino just looks better by default. It shares this advantage with ext.js, compared to the e.g. Dijit (and qooxdoo). Whether that's actually worth that much is a good question, considering that any respectable outward-facing webapp is bound to have a style of their own and plenty of designers to make that happen. In that regard, I thin Cappuccino might be even more suited to intranet enterprise applications, where there's not that many designers around and having a default good look is definitely worth it (and having things look like a desktop app is actually an advantage).

In the end, the big difference is between the desktop way of doing things the more common jquery/dojo/YUI enhanced-web page style.