In a desperation move, tried to look into Flutter.
The first “hello world” experience was the smoothest so far – the dev workstation installation is simple, a very good plugin for VSCode is provided and the “getting started” page is great: https://developers.google.com/learn/pathways/intro-to-flutter
Dart language is very much like Java, so when you know one you’ll understand the other just fine.
The negatives:
- no GUI designer
- and no cross platform builds – you need to build on a Mac to build an OS X app…