> The main consensus in the native space is that Qt is still miles ahead of any other cross-platform desktop framework (including WxWidgets). Doesn't mean that Qt is anywhere good - it's just the least worst option out of all.

That's not consensus. I very much reject a "desktop framwork". Qt has its own abstractions for everything from sockets to executing processes and loading images, and I don't want that. It forces one to build the entire app in C++, and that's because, although open-source, its design revolves around the needs of the paying customers of Trolltech: companies doing multi-platform paid apps.

I want a graphical toolkit: a simple library that can be started in a thread and allows me to use whatever language runtime I want to implement the rest of the application.

> I hoped someday Flutter might be mature enough for desktop development

Anything that forces a specific language and/or runtime is dead in the water.

> I very much reject a "desktop framwork". Qt has its own abstractions for everything from sockets to executing processes and loading images, and I don't want that.

Yes, that is the consensus of why Qt sucks - it's a massive framework that tries to do everything at the same time with a massive toolset of in-house libraries. This is inherently tied to the revenue model of the Qt Company - sell custom modules that work well with the Qt ecosystem at a high enterprise-level price. I also wish to just use the "good" parts of Qt but I can't, since it already has a massive QtCore as its dependency.

However, there is still no cross-platform framework except for Qt that can actually do the most important things that a desktop framework actually needs: an actual widget editor, styling and theming, internationalization, interop with native graphics APIs (though I have gripes with their RHI system), etc. That's why I'm rooting for PanGUI (https://www.pangui.io/) to succeed - it pretty much completes all the checkboxes you have, but it's still WIP and in closed alpha.

> I hoped someday Flutter might be mature enough for desktop development >> Anything that forces a specific language and/or runtime is dead in the water.

Yeah, but at that time I thought this was at least better than wrangling with Qt / QML. You can write the core application logic ("engine" code) in C++ and bind it with Dart. There are already some companies I've seen gone a similar route with C# / WPF.

> Anything that forces a specific language and/or runtime that I don't like is dead in the water.

Ftfy.