Like majewsky said, Qt was and still is so far ahead of GTK it's completely unreal. But you're also not factoring in the fact that LXDE already existed for 10 years, and we moved that off GTK. LXQt is a continuation of it all.
I pushed really hard in favour of KDE frameworks. I specifically pushed for kwin to be a bit more independent, and we got that. LXQt was a driving force behind the need for KDE apps to become less tied to their own desktop. LXQt, today, is using several libraries from KDE which were duplicated in the ecosystem before that (eg. Solid, kidletime, kwindowsystem).
We worked so much on reducing fragmentation. Do you think I'd be bitching about it and then undermining my own efforts?
