That's true. I still don't know why we said "using two screwdrivers for these two kinds of screw is too hard, here's a sledgehammer instead", rather than build tooling to make it easier to build cross-platform programs...

I'm pretty hopeful these days about Qt for Python and this build system: https://build-system.fman.io/

Unfortunately, it costs money even if your app is OSS, in some cases.

I wouldn't mind if PaintShop Pro made less frequent releases. None of the features I care about has changed in a significant way in the last 18 years or so. I used PSP 7 in the early oughts to do some web design work on the side; I still use PSP X8 every now and then to make transparent PNGs. As long as it gets the job done on a platform I have access to, I don't care how many platforms they don't support.

PSP was not cross platform, it was Windows only. I don't know if that's changed recently but I suspect it hasn't.

I think the point was that it was lean (didn't need 100MB to draw a screen) because it /wasn't/ cross-platform - more tools are cross-platform by default now because it's easy (which leads to the abstractions that give you requirements of 100MB to draw a screen).

Modern software has certainly become abstraction-heavy, hasn't it? It's not just the GUI libraries. Paint Shop Pro was lean and mean because it had to be, the targeted hardware just wouldn't support anything bloated. Not to mention that many copies were downloaded by modem.