> The problem has traditionally been that most of these things are hobby projects from a single developer, and they go moribund when the developer gets bored and moves onto something else.

I don't know for other libs, but Qt has strong API stability guarantees, so you need to generate the bindings only once per major Qt version - that is, once every five or six years. Just because the binding hasn't been commited to for a few years doesn't mean that it won't work.

> It would just be so awesome if there were a viable cross-platform desktop GUI solution, for a modern statically typed language somewhere between the extremes of C++

What's wrong, with, as you mentioned, C++ and Qt ? It can be as high-level as you want it to. I've been successfully developing a large desktop app with it and it has been a pleasure from start to end.