A huge percentage of the work required to implement web apps is boring crap: browser testing, working around bugs for quirks in different browsers, look and feel review, screwing around with stuff in five different languages / formats just to do something trivial (i.e. Javascript, CSS, HTML, Python, SQL) ...
I really don't think there are many web developers that can pound out an interactive web GUI with the speed that I can bang out a cross-platform desktop app with a reasonable toolkit. There's a natural bias here towards web apps since this is a web-app community, but there are a lot of great developers out there that like working on desktop stuff.
@webwright -- feel free to contact me. I know a lot of people from the KDE world that do cross-platform apps; I could try to put you in touch with some people.
You're right, of course; doing full-stack development, no matter the target platform, involves a lot of unsexy busywork. Browser incompatibilities are an issue as well, and there are certainly a number of layers of technology beneath any finished application.
That being said, I don't think it's fair to argue that desktop apps are easier to develop, test, and deploy than their online counterparts. Furthermore, information-sharing features that are trivial to implement via the web can be rather more complicated to build into a desktop tool.
Both metaphors definitely have their advantages. There are things that are trivial in one setting that are painful in the other. I'm not trying to argue for one or the other being altogether better; I think that's really context and user specific and as I've said before, I definitely think it's easier to build a business around web technologies.
To tie this back to the original topic: great desktop hackers can throw together desktop apps quickly, and know the quirks for developing cross platform (just like great web hackers know browser quirks). In contrast to most of the crowd here, I'm pretty darn good at desktop (and server / systems) programming, and mediocre at web programming, so I just see the other side of the coin.
I really don't think there are many web developers that can pound out an interactive web GUI with the speed that I can bang out a cross-platform desktop app with a reasonable toolkit. There's a natural bias here towards web apps since this is a web-app community, but there are a lot of great developers out there that like working on desktop stuff.
@webwright -- feel free to contact me. I know a lot of people from the KDE world that do cross-platform apps; I could try to put you in touch with some people.