"We don’t yet know what to build" - and continues with the thousands of way a GUI-framework could be built.
I'm sitting here thinking: is it that important for the user? For a hobby-project sure, but doesn't developers want to wow customers with really nicely designed GUI:s because of the simple fact that beauty sells?
I'd argue that if you could find a really, really great GUI-designer (not developer) to take a crack on just one platform (so as to not make a Frankensteins monster) it would matter way more than if the architecture was modern or not.
To put it in another way, developers need a guiding hand with UI-design, not how to structure their program.
I think there are (at least) two fundamentally different ways to create UIs, suited for two fundamentally different types of UI applications:
Programmer-driven for "tools" (think Photoshop, Maya, IDEs, debuggers), and artist-driven for "user applications" (think typical mobile applications and games).
For the first type, "maintainability and functionality" is more important than "beauty on the surface", and it's also important to give the programmer a framework which encourages "best practices", so that the result is not an archetypal "programmer UI".
Only for the second type, "shininess" is more important than everything else, this includes general aesthetics, colors, animations / transitions, etc...
I'm sitting here thinking: is it that important for the user? For a hobby-project sure, but doesn't developers want to wow customers with really nicely designed GUI:s because of the simple fact that beauty sells?
I'd argue that if you could find a really, really great GUI-designer (not developer) to take a crack on just one platform (so as to not make a Frankensteins monster) it would matter way more than if the architecture was modern or not.
To put it in another way, developers need a guiding hand with UI-design, not how to structure their program.