Why does it has to be a compromise, either get functionality at the expense of outdated GUI, or get stylish GUI at the expense of making it harder to implement functionality, the whole point is we need both.
What sucks about the current "toy app" trend is most of those apps are close to useless that is why they rely on eye candy full on, cause simple people are easy to impress.
And just because eye candy is a money milking marketing strategy does not mean it cannot be incorporated into software whose use goes beyond displaying online service content.
The reason I went on this "crusade" is for quite a while I tried doing modern design with QWidget, and not only is it awkward and backwards, but performance lacks too. QWidget is built on literally a 20 century concept, and it doesn't fit. And it sucks there is not 21 century, more custom, more fluid, more dynamic and interactive C++ GUI API.
Kudos to the trolls for inventing the concept of Qt Quick, and I know it must be a nice feeling to have many people using a language you invented (QML) but it is quite foolish to turn your back on Qt's primary programming language for like 2 decades. They could easily have invented Qt Quick to be natively open to C++ and plug QML in as an option, which would save the efforts of having to add C++ frontend support later, when annoyed and disappointed developers call for it. A smart programme will always make a new API open to native use and plugin additional languages support, and the only logical reason I see behind the decision to provide the benefits of a new GUI API exclusively through QML is using innovation to extort developers into adopting yet another limited usage, inferior in terms of performance and efficiency, leading to even more fragmentation of the developer base language, like we don't have enough of those already.
I cannot shake the felling QML is a little late to the game too, I mean, with HTML5 and all, surely, Qt Quick may have better performance out of the box and the potential to extend it with C++, but HTML5 with JS is quite powerful and has a lot of advantages compared to QML, our company is already developing fluid, dynamic websites with animations and interactive features, and all you need is a browser, even without HTML5 support those are totally doable in HTML and JS. Not to mention HTML is an open standard with quite a lot of users, more than QML is likely to ever enjoy. QML would have been amazing... 5 years ago, but for what QML offers there already many good solutions enjoying amazingly good adoption rate. That is why I feel Qt Quick needs to exploit the advantage of offering native binary performance and efficiency and the power of being free to use C++ without having to base your designs on QML's limitations and write extra code to interface native code to QML.
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