Fully agree with you that in a perfect world desktop apps would be the best for end users and programmers. In that world we would be still writing code on Delph

Fully agree with you that in a perfect world desktop apps would be the best for end users and programmers. In that world we would be still writing code on Delphi or Jbuilder. One major problem with desktop apps is still distribution. Entry point for majority of modern desktops is still a browser, through which you search, discover and download. Just like with mobile apps, older versions will remain in use and require support for various reasons (imagine IT department that maintains images of their devices — their update cycle will not be what you expect it to be). Another one is that you cannot really put all logic on client and trust that client to manipulate your data in DB, so you will have significant amount of code on the backend. Stored procedures can technically solve the problem, but developer productivity will suffer terribly if you try to build your middleware inside the db. The tooling for Oracle DB or Postgres and tooling for Java are like stone hammer vs a toolkit from Bosch Professional.