I don't know if I'm missing your point, you're overly nostalgic, or you just never had to write a substantial X Window app back when most of these apps were dev

I don't know if I'm missing your point, you're overly nostalgic, or you just never had to write a substantial X Window app back when most of these apps were developed, but nothing about that development environment was easy. It was full of incredibly verbose, buggy API calls with a bunch of platform-specific bugs and everything was manual.