I'd love to have the dynamism of the web and the performance of native all on one platform. We're not there yet.
I also disagree that app development was harder back then. Back then we had IDEs that included online help and APIs that were actually _designed_. It wasn't a perfect world but it was at least coherent.
Also, I don't really get what you're complaining about in terms of IDEs or API design here--go spend some time on the Mozilla Developer Network and come back and tell me it's just slapdash and thoughtless work.
What I'm saying is that if you sat down to design a nice cross-platform, distributed environment for building applications it would not look like the web.
How many multiple-megabyte images could you display in 24-bit color at 1080p on that Pentium while scrolling? How good was the support for Unicode and non-English languages? How many streaming videos and ads could you see at one time? When you downloaded kilobytes of markup, and in turn request a dozen more things from a server on the other side of the planet, how long exactly did it take to parse and load? How many times did you chat with people and embed pictures in your conversation, while listening to streaming internet radio?
Hint: computers are actually doing quite a bit more in apps these days than they used to, and its only through the good luck of hiding this fact most of the time that you can make such silly complaints.
But it's a silly complaint that some web apps can't keep up with my typing? Please.