(Another goal was better sandboxing bitween apps. Their project was called Bitfrost and was in many ways the first step towards flatpak that we use today)
The current complexity is a product of poor design from a sincere effort for simplicity.
Trying to be easy, lightweight, simple, is the silver bullet way to create a mess and it's why when you see those words in software names it's always just a sprawling stochastic tangle.
The easiest way to avoid the mess is to make things dumb.
Not sure whether I'd personally go with PyQt. (Or a post-1.x Python feature set in general). What would be neat is some kind of "My first Github" social coding platform, where you could push your homegrown new features, discuss & share them.
[1]: https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/user/components/applicati...