I think the difference is that in our case we were looking for handholding, and a UI toolkit gave us that. We aren't designers, and being developers we have a

I think the difference is that in our case we were looking for handholding, and a UI toolkit gave us that. We aren't designers, and being developers we have a tendency to nitpick which is only worse when the subject is just outside our area of expertise... Picking a design "platform" and using a toolkit to implement it pretty much stopped most of that in it's tracks and let us focus on the actual application. It's obviously not for everyone, but it was exactly what we wanted and needed.