I think you made a good point there about the drawbacks of cross-platform end-user apps. The problem is that the idea of developing a single code-base for all t

I think you made a good point there about the drawbacks of cross-platform end-user apps. The problem is that the idea of developing a single code-base for all the different platforms are so damn compelling to both managers (from a business perspective) and also lots of engineers who've learned to accept code re-use as the holy grail of our craft. Even doing the core rendering part cross-platform has a lot of technical issues as the platforms provide a lot of functionality that can be leveraged by the rendering engine (typesetting, drawing, animation etc...). Consequently, the more you want to integrate with the native facilities of the platforms, the more interfaces and glue components you need in order to hook the platform independent part up to the native facilities. This leads to a loads and loads of ceremonial code and interfaces that introduce additional layers of complexity.