I wonder if you've ever seen an expert using Visual Studio in its heyday... Prototype GUIs could be up and running within minutes. The same was true of Java Swing, in the right hands. These technologies have fallen out of favor now, but I find it hard to believe that today's swirling pool of web frameworks have reduced the cost of GUIs compared to anything other than Web in the days of jquery. What they certainly do is change how these tools are delivered to users and customers. Perhaps that's for the better, I don't know. But I miss having all _my_ stuff on _my_ PC, that's for sure.

I strongly agree with your view. I used to be a loyal user of Sublime Text, it performed exceptionally well and was incredibly fast, which I loved. However, perhaps I misspoke, what I meant to say is that due to the low development costs and rich ecosystem of web technologies, current applications are more inclined to use web technology stacks when developing GUIs. But (yes, there's always a "but"), the performance of web applications is still far behind that of native applications (although there has been significant improvement).

The "rapid" in development of web technologies is a lie.

Haha, that's a sharp critique, and I've also felt that the development of the web isn't fast enough. But actually, when you think about the web from ten years ago, or even twenty years ago, there has been significant progress.