I hear you on "swing". Such utter garbage for a host of reasons. What really made me hate it was programs built with it were designed in pixels; the same complaint I have for a lot of websites. Again I've been using non-standard default font sizes since Windows 3.0 when I got an IBM 8514 setup. Thus programs that don't scale to the interface settings end up on my shit list.

And thus EVERY crapplet slopped together with swing goes right on the naughty list.

But worse it did something I get the feeling with on a lot of these idiotic "frameworks". That they take a simple task and make it harder. It's exactly what you said about swing vs. building using web tech. It takes what should be a small and simple task, and makes it harder by deepening the complexity, depth, and scope.

And it's why the past 15 years I've walked into so many "large enterprise scale projects" and said "Why did you make this a massive unweildy mess, instead of a handful of smaller simpler ones?"

Oh and nice to see the word fungible used properly. Annoying how crypto-derps have made that a red flag word meaning "scam".

Your boulder analogy is an interesting one since I live in New Hampshire. I see a boulder in the road I stop in front of it blocking traffic in the lane heading towards it, turn on my hazards, and if it's dark I get the flares out of my trunk until ranger services or the police show up. That way someone doesn't just blindly crash into it or worse, into oncoming traffic.

You don't want to know what I think about people who just "drive off"

As Carlin joked, "I obstruct"