The reason given was that it needed to use a native GUI toolkit. I don't know why this was the case. Maintaining separate GUIs for Linux, Windows and OSX was definitely not practical though.
I feel like enforcement is rather random though. It seems like submitting updates draws their attention.
But you could be right. It may be it's a rule they abandoned.
In any case I don't think there's anyone around with the heart to try again.