[fian]

Yep, we did some deep customisation of a couple of key UI widgets and found it very time consuming. Changing the Look and Feel to Nimbus was a major improvement, but that came with semi-regular breakages when performing minor version JVM updates. I vaguely remember us overriding a couple of Nimbus defaults but finding that could have unexpected consequences elsewhere in the UI (ie LaFs are complex), so we didn't go down that path much.

While Swing styling support wasn't that great, I miss the flexibility of nesting layout managers for composing complex, resizable UIs.

When Java FX was first announced, I started learning it to see how we might use it for our applications. At the time it lacked a lot of widgets we needed, but it had much better support for styling. Sadly I didn't keep up with Java FX. While I have no direct need for it in my current job, I still get the itch to whip up the occasional desktop app, so I plan on getting back up to speed soon.