I'm a big fan of FRC, but a lot of those techniques are about "special-case" UIs, the way you see them in Web UIs or "multimedia" applications, not pleasing form and widget layouts. That's a bit of an intermediate step between just spewing forth UI elements and constructing fluid animated, mirrored list displays. And sadly often neglected, especially if your tools don't take care of it automatically (layout engines, Interface Builder etc.). Java and Tcl didn't have to look that bad, but sadly they often do.

Or, well, one could just use JGoodies ;)

I agree with you.

Still it is a kind of first step.

Tooling was the major problem. Swing could be made to look as nice as WinForms, but defaults matter when developers are lazy.

Android is another example where if one wants to make cool Material design applications, some UI programming skill is needed.

"Filthy Rich Client" only shows how to do it, but it's still much, much harder than in QML (even Qt Widgets supported CSS styling) and WPF. I would say by a factor of at least 5 regarding QML and slightly less for WPF.

Yes, but it was possible.

Not reading such books, just meant many devs were totally unaware of how to do it.