I very much agree with all of your points. ExtJS is hard to beat in terms of the breadth of its widget set, layout configurations, data handling models, etc. Ju

I very much agree with all of your points. ExtJS is hard to beat in terms of the breadth of its widget set, layout configurations, data handling models, etc. Just for the almighty GridPanel, it's worth it I would say. But it's also more appropriate for internal, non-public facing apps. For that, you get pretty much all the usual benefits of a web application (ease of deployment, etc.) without getting lost in a traditional desktop GUI jungle. It's true that the library is frighteningly monolithic and the learning curve quite steep, but personally, I very much appreciate the declarative syntax, the very complete documentation, the multiple examples, the flexible MVC structure and the fact that it can easily result in nice decoupled code, as you can plug any backend you like, as long as it communicates through a well-defined protocol (I personally favor Python and Flask).