[alzoid]

I feel the same way. I was writing a desktop Windows/Mac app using swing 10 years ago. The look and feel that came out of the box was fine. At first it was metal. It was a light blue with gradients to white on the buttons. Then they came out with Nimbus - I think that one was based on SVG or something similar.

No client complained about either of those. And at the end of the day you could always call a method to get the platform look and feel and it could look like Windows or Mac OS. I had a menu to change this in the app itself.

I never found the UI development hard. I was hand coding it in the beginning. I thought the Layouts were pretty straight forward (except grid bag which I never used). Eventually NetBeans had a decent UI designer and I used that.

I think the sloppy or slow UI's came from developers who never took advantage of the Observable / MVC aspects of the UI components.