I love what you guys are doing but highlights how absurdly hard iOS development is compared to web

I don't share your assessment. Is it because I did iOS apps before web apps? Curious how many others feel the same?

Seems like a reasonable poll question: Which is harder: web app development or native app development?

I was telling a younger colleague the other day how back in the day, I was "competing" with a peer at a company doing nuclear design software (Siemens Power Corp at the time). I was doing it in VisualWorks Smalltalk, he was doing his in straight C and X Windows. Competition aside, both of us built multi window complex graphical design tools that front ended heavy duty simulators, managed various batch jobs, tons of IO, parsing, and lots of color graphic drawing (mine was for fuel assembly (pin and axial enrichments) design, and his was for core layout (where the assemblies go during each reload)). The graphics were simpler (no antialiasing, any alpha we did with clever dithering tricks, not much in the way of animations, though we did each roll some). Both even stored /retrieved into a sort of database (a homegrown data versioning system). But... it was just one of each us for each "app".

Sadly, all Ux development seems orders of more magnitude complicated and beuqacratic now days. Some things are easier and vastly simpler than they used to be, and yet, the sum result is more difficult. I'm not exactly sure why.

Totally agree, we have a lot of ideas for how to make the experience better.