> I think we'll get there eventually but until a native toolkit presents an interface as easy to use as the web developers are going to take the path of least resistance.

Like Qt did with QML? http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qml-tutorial1.html

Yeah, but Qt has licensing costs for commercial use...

Qt is LGPL, so unless you need to link to it statically or make proprietary modifications to Qt itself, you don't need to pay licensing costs.

Ah right, I wasn't aware of that.

Qt is (largely; a couple of optional components are GPL) LGPLv3, so can be used commercially without getting the commercial license.

Oh, lets be professionals and not pay for our tools like everyone else does, who needs money anyway!

Less painful according to who? From reading this thread it appears that most devs claiming it's incredibly easy have never actually worked with other UI toolkits at all, so their experience is largely worthless.

I've done web UI dev. I've also written code using GTK, Qt, Windows, Swing and JavaFX. A good modern UI toolkit like JavaFX or Qt blows the web stack out of the water on almost every metric. Developer productivity, correctness, speed ... you name it.