>I know there's a lot of hate in here for Electron, but it truly makes cross-platform desktop app development achievable for small companies and indies.
As a dev with a lot of experience in JS/HTML/CSS Electron makes things super easy, especially when it can be part of the regular build pipeline.
Learning Qt means figuring out a whole new stack and build chain. Maybe the result would be better, but with only a few hours a week I didn't feel like it would have been worth the time investment.
>Qt is not nearly as easy to use as Electron, especially if you're a small company and need to hire front end devs for cheap.
Sure it is.
>Also Qt GUIs look like garbage, but it's hard to quantify why.
No more garbage-like than you're getting with Electron and just as style-able (with arguable superior layout engines). Qt has a number of style palettes; perhaps you're used to using applications which chose to use non-native/standard palettes.
I've written apps with GTK, Qt and Electron in the past. Of the three frameworks, Qt is easily the hardest (albeit "the best" for cross-platform native development). I'm not sure what your experience is with it, but I never once felt like it was easier than writing an Electron app.
So does Qt