Sigh. Swing still broken in Java 5.0

I'm happy to say that this doesn't worry me much any more since I've switched to SWT for GUI development but, unbelievably, it appears Sun still haven't fixed any of the outstanding stupidities in Swing's look and feel emulation in Java 5.0. It's been seven years since the Swing project started.

For example, this image shows font glyphs that are still broken in 5.0 on Windows:

This image (via this blog) shows the glitches becoming visible in the UI when using JFileChooser. And, according to the entry, all the usual missing borders, spacing issues, etc that WinLAF fixes are still in 5.0. And this bug (Java developer site login reqd unfortunately) describes the issues in all their ugliness.

Now these issues individually are irritating, but when they're all combined they become totally frustrating to a programmer who's spent so much effort making a good GUI, only to have it suck in ways they can do nothing about. And it only confirms the sentiments of the anti-Swing bigots to see Swing apps still look as crappy in 2004 as they did years ago.

I have to wonder, as the poster notes, if the Swing guys actually ever use their own stuff on Windows. I have noticed in the past that a lot of screenshots in articles by the Swing team show the CDE (Motif) L&F, which I'm sure is emulated perfectly in all its ugliness.