Ack. Why does't every comment submission form have a Preview button?

Anyhow, here's pretty much what I posted on a board for posting Swing issues at Sun today, perhaps edited a little where it was obvious I needed more sleep. And yes, much of it you read here first. Oh boy.
    Great summation! Those are certainly the three main problems with Swing -- perceived performance for whatever reason, API complexity (aka, IDEs that aren't quite up to the GUI-building task), and native looks.

    I'd add one thing for number three: Sun really needs to decide if the great goal of Swing -- to provide consistent GUIs in every way, regardless of OS, extending the concept of "Write once, run [exactly the same way] anywhere" to GUIs -- hasn't failed.

    Take a look at a quote from this page.

    In the chat, " Ian Formanek, who is chief of technology for the NetBeans project at Sun Microsystems", says:
    3.6 focused on 2 major things: the use of Windows L&F on Windows 2000 and XP (and updating the NetBeans design to look cool under those L&Fs), and introducing a brand-new window management system to streamline the way the IDE fits into the natural workflow of development.

    If Sun's development team for its most popular GUI'd app written in Java is spending half their time making Swing look and perform well on one OS, well, the xplat L&F has absolutely failed. Hey, I love the Napkin Look & Feel as much as anyone (a great idea) -- and therefore pluggable L&Fs -- but in the grand scheme, the extendability and xplat features make for wasted effort, plain and simple.

    Swing's "Java look" is so bad that not even Netbeans users (aka, Java developers) can ignore Swing apps that don't look native. Doesn't this mean Swing's xplat goal has failed miserably? I mean, nobody should be more capable of ignoring quirks and understanding why having a Java look and feel that acts exactly the same, regardless of platform, is a laudable goal. If not even the evangelists have faith, why not go ahead and sell out to SWT (or at least start AWT development back up) now?

    (And that's likely where part of the black hole [of response from Sun, as mentioned by the previous poster to the thread this comment's in] comes from -- what's a Swing expert to do if future Swing development's scrapped? The context of their discussion is, unfortunately, "How do we fix Swing?" right now, not, "Is Swing irrepairably broken?" or even the more practical, "Where are GUI widget-building resources best placed?")