Re: UI design and build

This whole web thing has become increasingly complex

It is complex in the space of tools offered and paradigms, in the "choice space", but it's "shallow complexity". It is almost a "linguistic" problem, a lack of standardization, like reinventing things over and over with "frameworks". You feel like taking the proverbial forest when you needed just a banana over and over again.Internet protocols like http and smtp gained momentum because they were dead simple at beginning, you could have asked a web page with telnet in the old days...

But to build ERP like stuff effectively and economically and therefore *sustainably* for your enterprise you need to have standards.

DDS and DisplayFiles were the "view" before MVC became a thing and fashionable, such models stems from decades of problem solving and reasoning in developing conversational business apps.The debate is not 5250 , web, or images projected directly in the brain, it the basic fundamentals and primitives that the OS offers.DDS and DSPF was a solution and a paradigm, and you could have hired a person that "know the 400" and was assumed to know those and therefore productive in little time and able to reason about programs. I know consultants that supports and fully dev full custom solutions in two/three unrelated companies in a week, the value is knowing the company, the tech stack is assumed and well known.
This was a big, incredible advantage in term of competitiveness and economics (that as an indicator summarize the effective use of time, sustanability, etc.).
The only one that could (could have) put a patch on this is the vendor that owns the OS (the same that some external vendor tool does and allows to do on the i with openaccess - and that I also use - but with the obvious fragmentation in solutions).
Delphi is still around for a reason to dev complex business solutions, despite being called dead as many times as the 400. Visual basic also....