Well, it was an enterprise language, and quite often most of the flaws you'd get in Java GUIs were there in the previous, native versions, too. Just like they're still there in the intranet web apps that replaced a few of the Java clients.

(I know a few people who still prefer the old-fashioned mainframe terminal apps, if available. If all you have is a few colors and line-drawing characters, even programmers have a hard time messing up simple forms. Not saying that we/they don't often succeed despite this difficulty...)

Nah, the lesson I was thinking about was taught earlier, in the days of AWT. Back then, Java was fairly slow, and the garbage collector was not as sophisticated as today. When the GC started collecting, you knew.

Ah, but on those days all implementations were still plain old interpreters.

With modern Java GUI apps, you still do, as any Netbeans user could attest.