PySimpleGUI 6

imho: because Microsoft fabulously, utterly dropped the ball. I suspect a combination of well-meaning intentions, Microsoft inanity, and their infamous internal politics helped.

- VB apps weren't great from the point of view of internationalization, accessibility. Nor were they easy to adapt to multiple screen sizes. Hard to retrofit the ecosystem to make that right it seemed.

- Microsoft decided to solve that problem by attacking a different one (symptomatic of their internal politics), by pushing .Net. That smelled to me of the victors of an internal battle (VB vs .Net) taking over the real estate of the VB ecosystem. However, the developers of VB apps got a vote, and they bailed.

Microsoft's timing was also not great in that the web and mobile revolution arrived just as they were wrangling with all this and made a lot of the discussion irrelevant. No one starting a new app today is going to reach for VB.Net, they're going to default to a web app. If desktop perf is the target, they'll grit their teeth and try to figure out what desktop tookit (WinForms, XAML, MAUI etc) they should be using...yet more friction compared to webapps.

It's a tragedy that scratch-your-own-itch desktop apps went away, but I can't say I am at all surprised.

> I can’t make every third-party package do exact version pins

Every third-party package already uses exact version dependencies, you don't need to do anything.

> then I couldn’t patch a transitive dependency faster than the upstream even if there’s a drop-in patch release which is 100% compatible.

You can always override the transitive dependency version if you want to.

> I’d also want hashes to avoid file modification, although that’s less of a concern for anything on Maven Central where the releases are immutable.

It's not just Maven Central, there's a strong norm of releases being immutable everywhere. If you're worried about attacks, there's a plugin you can enable to check the GPG signatures.