Regardless of my personal view of JS desktop apps the reasoning usually follows out of a combination of these:

* Web browsers already have a way of creating widgets rendering them, changing their skins

* There are many javascript libraries and frameworks, so can use those for connecting backends, processing events, etc.

* With a bit of luck you can run the same code as an actual web page.

* Desktop app is an after-thought today because web service/web page came first. The world of software applications with a GUI on top started with Desktop apps that were then adapted for the web. Today perhaps the opposite is true.

What is the alternative to building a cross-platform desktop app that isn't tied to the browser security model? Build a different app for every platform?

When I set out, a few years ago, to build a gui app in JS in Windows (but cross-platform), I found RingoJS which is a wrapper around Java. My entire app could be in a single .js file, with access to all Java libs. For the widget library, I chose SWT. I built a few very simple apps, despite having never programmed in Java before. Later, I found how to run my .js file directly with RhinoJS and SWT from the command line.

I'm pretty confident that this is the simplest way to build desktop apps in JS in Windows :)

Qt and Java.

Or WX widgets.

Qt

It's OK that you don't like using HTML/JS, but a lot of people do like using them (which is also OK), and those people are the target audience for things like node-webkit.

Also, one might simply outperform him/herself in HTML/JS than in other languages. Can't blame that...