What I miss is RAD tools, the power and development speed of tools like Borland Delphi, Borland C++ Builder, Windows Forms. They made a breeze adding a GUI to an app.
Doing GUIs only in code is tedious and boring.
A decent blend of RAD and visual programming is the Max/MSP that ships with Ableton Live. It's fairly straightforward to build little audio/MIDI devices, then switch to visual programming for the implementation (objects/patchcords/control in Max terms).
> Doing GUIs only in code is tedious and boring.
Totally. But given that most GUI software these days involves client/server, I'm not sure if there's a simpler solution.
I work on Nitro[1] these days, and it's an attempt to make GUI development simpler and less tedious, primarily by trying to abstract away client/server programming and opting for a simpler way to program UIs without dealing with callbacks or event-handlers.