You wrote: <<QT was an ecosystem shock to me. I barely knew what to do to get started and got lost easily.>> This is surprising to me. It is the gold standard for cross-platform desktop applications. (Readers: Please note that I used "cross-platform" and "desktop" _together_. Yes, I know there are plenty of other GUI frameworks that cover other categories.) The amount of official and unofficial documentation, code samples, and Q&A for Qt is simply mind boggling. Did you not find these docs helpful? Or maybe you do not like C++? Lots of people also use PyQt (or variants) with Python and get along quite well.
Also, if Qt isn't good for you, what else did you try? My experience with GTK+ was awful -- bizarre API and terrible docs. Further, the community was unhelpful and borderline trollish. This was well-documented by the "Subsurface" team (SCUBA diving software) during their transition from GTK+ to Qt.
It used to be much more involved in the past. Of course you could hand write the code, but as it was originally I believe a preprocessor was the only way to sensibly write signal support, something that AFAIK stopped being true around 2003 but by then moc was entrenched.
Also, if Qt isn't good for you, what else did you try? My experience with GTK+ was awful -- bizarre API and terrible docs. Further, the community was unhelpful and borderline trollish. This was well-documented by the "Subsurface" team (SCUBA diving software) during their transition from GTK+ to Qt.