QGIS is often too heavy or inaccessible. And I believe that GIS is something everyone can do. You don't need a fancy degree and training to explore spatial data and build maps.
I tried once but quickly realised it was beyond the scope of a part time project.
> QGIS is often too heavy or inaccessible
The reasoning is the contradiction here. While most GIS work is conceptually simple, there's so many things people want to do - any new GIS program will either feel incomplete or end up getting incredibly bloated and complex (per QGIS). Try dealing with raster+vector, different file formats, different databases, projection systems, different web service standards, tiling formats, 2d+3d+temporal visualisation, proprietary libraries for particular analysis, etc. etc.
Not to say QGIS can't be improved or a better webGIS wouldn't be helpful, but its a tough task to do so many things even if it all seems conceptually simple.
Lets not forget QGIS itself was basically a clean-slate approach which started much less able than previous open source GIS (Grass).
GeoTIFF, GeoJSON, CRS/projection support (OpenLayers handles this quite well already), tabular and spatial joins, filters, buffer/intersect.
A concern I think we share is that you'll always need that one, less common feature to get to the finish line. This may be. But I haven't found it to be the case as often as I worried. A lot of questions are really just about "how does X relate to Y?" where the linkage is space, time, or some other attribute.
Next would be GRASS.
JSTS is pure JS and does a lot of vector GIS fine.
I think those three things and a decent UI would be an absolutely killer Web app for the general public to do more GIS.
[0]: https://www.unfolded.ai/studio
(Disclaimer: I work at Unfolded)
This Map is DOPE
https://studio.unfolded.ai/public/0c825631-2000-4ea7-a43f-a5...
https://i.imgur.com/5E6ancZ.png
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However - it would be a lot better when you add another layer, that for, say an ARC layer, you should be able to click on the Source HEX, and then the Dest HEX - or Paste the HEX ID into the field, currently it demands LAT-LON for source and destination.... IT looks like it tries - But I cant seem to correctly apply it?
I build Web GIS software for managing worldwide fleets of thousands of robots in real time. I'm super into this stuff. Can't wait to see more from Unfolded.