[markmiro]

I think there are several reasons for this:

* The APIs for building web UIs are really hairy and difficult to understand. * The fact that the web is a standard and quick way of getting apps to people means lots of people are heavily invested in it. * There's still a disconnect between developers and designers. This means many libraries seem to be developed around recognizing past patterns rather than a forward-looking vision. At least that's my guess. * Other human things such as the desire for recognition, users taking any level of UI polish for granted and expecting more over the years, and so on. * The surface area of features exposed on the frontend is enormous. You have forms, arbitrary shapes, layout, color, state management, querying external data sources, and so on.

You combine the above and you get massive technology churn. Maybe people underestimate the complexity involved.

I get the frustration though because at the end of the day we're still pushing pixels onto the screen. Even a lot of the primitives haven't changed in a while. We still have our colored boxes and text arranged in some configuration. You might expect all the good ideas to have been tried already.