I am struggling with the GUI designer factor. Most of my career has been spent working on WinForms and WPF GUIs and a stack of different things under them. Visu

I am struggling with the GUI designer factor. Most of my career has been spent working on WinForms and WPF GUIs and a stack of different things under them. Visual designers are fantastic for tweaking layout, but lately the question I'm asking is whether it's really worth being forced into a particular way of retaining state in the UI and a particular edit/compile/test workflow. When I step back and look at the broader life cycle of projects, very little time is spent in the visual designer. Is that because visual designers are just that powerful or does it speak more to the relative weight of other development factors dominating projects, at least the ones I work on, and admit a possibility that the designer may be worth giving up in trade for other gains in other areas like interactivity (e.g. F# REPL) or a different conceptual model (e.g. React-style functional components)? I surely wouldn't want to write big WinForms/WPF GUIs in normal imperative style: var f = new Form(); var p = new Panel(); var b = new Button(); b.Text = "Go"; b.Click += ... p.Add(b); f.Controls.Add(p); But the way React/Om and Elm are integrating GUI construction into the flow of the program is looking awfully compelling. I'm interested in hearing more perspectives on the tradeoffs between having visual designers and constructing the GUI in code, assuming an acceptably powerful syntax or model for constructing it.