Primary reason it's accepted is because people generally don't have a choice. It's rare to find an alternative to any given service that offers the same functionality but doesn't follow latest designer fads.

> it's more difficult for Web designers to make Swing apps look good.

Maybe they should bother to learn how to do it in first place?

People should do a lot of things. What they actually do is what matters. Despite all the web-inspired frameworks trying pave over real UI stacks in mobile devices, they have not succeeded in web-izing mobile UI. So, thankfully, we can turn our attention to the civil war of pubsub vs observer.

Yeah, I agree in what concerns the mobile space.