It's amazing how almost nobody in discussions like this ever acknowledges that. Are all the GNOME kiddies just so determined never to admit anything else could be better at anything, or do they genuinely not know how much shittier stuff is now than Windows was only a dozen years ago?

> Of course it lacks features we want today, especially things we are used to from the web, like highlighting fields with errors in them etc.,

Yeah, that's unfortunately true. But, since the definition of "What is an error?" is up to the app, it feels kind of excusable that pointing it out in the UI also did. Sure, could have been easily fixed with two more settings -- ErrorTextColour and ErrorBackgroundColour, something like that... But absent those, clear reds and yellows work pretty well (for the non-colourblind). You'd have to intentionally set your UI to be pretty garish for those to be taken for "normal" colours.

> but I often think new features can't entirely explain why the newer toolkits are so much less ergonomically useable.

All I can come up with is "Kids today, sigh".