Here is my view (I am now running 8.11 SP1 and 8.95).
The OneWorld web client is, indeed, becoming an industry joke as "thin client." It is the biggest "pig" imagineable, I agree with all of you...
I am so glad the airlines' and banks' websites i use hadn't adopted such thoughtless approach to "internet architechture," or I would be using a telephone!
But, please, agree that most of the customers' complaints against the web-client over the years, have ended up making the situation even worse, with every release!
The weak-minded "architects" and marketing geniuses in Denver don't realize that you can't have your cake and eat it, without imploding the product! They can't keep peddling the web-client by promising to "mimick" and "parrot" the fat architecture "features," which pushy customers ask for, while still "scrubbing" the old toolset forms with the generator to make them run on the Java server.
Also, have you looked at the crap that is being "restored" from the fat client functionality these days, even though it is totally unfitting to the web-client approach as a thin, few trips to the database, architechture? We now have MBs of javascript being pushed with each page to the browser, attempting to make the browser "fatter" than the fat client! High interactivity!?
In 8.95 I even have TypeAhead (AutoFill) for god's sake, red "in your face errors", "scroll to end," validations and interactions on every grid cell, "opening application" animations...
Someone at OpenWorld was once shamelessly saying that the browser PC, for advanced users may have to be multi-processor and need more RAM than an enterprise server
BTW, FYI, the original excuse for eliminating Windows client support in 8.11 was "power forms" -- this was going to free them up to develop "native" web functionality of the old applications, without the limitations of the existing toolset. Let's count how many of these native "web-only" Java-friendly apps all 8.11 customers are using today. I have seen only one, which we are not using -- P42101, replacing P4210, I remember that it worked great, especially on the PowerPoint platform