I mostly disagree. Like you said, Qt is the best cross-platform native-like GUI toolkit available today. And that is a hard achievement. There are many tradeoff

I mostly disagree. Like you said, Qt is the best cross-platform native-like GUI toolkit available today. And that is a hard achievement. There are many tradeoffs (some you pointed out) but the open source community seems to find a way around those limitations. There are thousands of open source libraries you can plug-in into your Qt app to overcome many of its limitations (although some remain, like how can't we still not easily change caret/cursor color of QTextEdit??). Unlike you, I like the direction that Qt is taking. I think QML and Qt Quick are great. I just implemented a feature in my note-taking app that turns Markdown text into Kanban board using QML and the experience has been great (https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/pull/574 https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/pull/574). I'm planning to continue transition from QWidgets to QML/Qt Quick. I do worry of the continuous friction with open source development and hate the online installers as well. I can recommend this useful tool https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall that allows you to easily download prebuilt Qt binaries. I hope they can revert their approach on that.