> My guess is that the platform creators tend to put a lot of money into look and feel for their native components. This is hard to match for a small open source project (or anyone, really).
I wonder whether the problem for cross-platform GUI can be solved by brute force. Swing had a terrible reputation for being slow and ugly, yet today I find Intellij (which is based on Swing) fast and good looking.
The brute-force work there is in IntelliJ, not in Swing – they've reimplemented the most broken Swing components, like the menu bar. Other Swing applications are still slow, ugly and buggy. (And despite all their work, IntelliJ still suffers from Swing bugs.)
