I think it's the core, the 2D engine, just never got the love it needed to be a great place to start. Nobody seemed to prioritize making that happen. Like, the

I think it's the core, the 2D engine, just never got the love it needed to be a great place to start. Nobody seemed to prioritize making that happen. Like, the antialiasing was noticably fuzzy. I never found an applet that looked like it belonged on the webpage. And when I built a few, it was a lot of work to even get font rendering to not be horrendous. And even then, you'd see what the browser rendered vs what the applet rendered and they were always off. I remember using images instead of font rendering sometimes. So, if you made a swing app, it was easy to put together, but hard to make look "professional". By the time of the Oracle acquisition, I'm pretty sure everyone just realized the browser and mobile "won" and that's why we just had JavaFX get broken off the platform and basically put out to pasture. But it's not like much went into the core platform itself to make building great UIs easy. The underlying 2D rendering just a great place to start. I mean, even today, there's some serious performance issues with IntelliJ on 4k monitors with scaling. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526 When I look at where JetBrains is going, it sure seems like they are building on top of a better 2D engine, in this case, skia: https://github.com/JetBrains/skija https://github.com/JetBrains/skija.