I liked Swing, and I liked the "native" Swing look better than the "platform" skins that were offered (they just looked wrong everywhere). Swing failed for a lot of reasons, mostly because Java performance on the desktop just wasn’t where it needed to be.

Flutter feels to me like a half-assed rebaking of Swing's basic ideas with worse HCI/UX and an insistence on pretending look like the target platform even if they consistently get it wrong and perform slower than molasses in January. Flutter is something that only an Enterprise Developer could love.

That’s a fair assesment of Swing; Java really held it back.

It’s definitely not easy to nail the target platform, and that may be Flutter’s downfall. Even without those native-lookalikes, Flutter still has a very robust rendering engine, and easy to write ffi for native binaries. It can survive on its own.