Indeed. I don't want to sound flippant as obviously a lot of hard work has gone into this but I would have thought that a lisp and a parser should be able to achieve the same no?
I really appreciate this article. CSS grid has a lot of moving parts and it's great to have some simple and practical best practice guidelines. Well done!
On the SPA front, I believe there will some movement on that front this year. Look out for "Modern Web Apps" as a new application category.
For multithreading, I take your point and agree. A heavily multithreaded component is not the best use case for OutSystems and if you want to use one, it is probably best written as an extension in C#.
As for dropping Java support, here's the rationale: Trying to support .Net and Java was costing engineering resources and also leading to inconsistent user experiences. Additionally, there are lots of other languages/platforms out there beyond C# and Java so the approach going forward to integrate with heterogeneous languages/platforms is to integrated into them using containers which is supported from version 11.
As for lock in, that's true of any proprietary product. However, it's worth noting that if you terminate your subscription you get all the source code and can run it up independently of OutSystems. Of course, you might argue that it's not as easy to change, which is true - but if you want to do lots of changes quickly, why not just stay with OutSystems? :)
So finally for complex web apps, I would argue you can do it (and you can check lots of references of places that have) but the tech is old and this will be improved starting this year. You can also build hybrid (i.e. Cordova based) mobile apps easily too - almost a third of new apps built on the platform are the latter.
At least this story was written deliberately in a style that brought you in, even if you didn't know where you were going, and you were happy to come along for the ride.
OTOH there are quite a few articles in HN like "Update 2.1 on WhizBangBlahBlah" and I have to read half the article before I know what a WhizBangBlahBlah is and why I might want one. :/
The only people who might comment on this are those who already know how to program so no longer see the complexity as a problem. However, the level of incidental complexity in programming languages, libraries, frameworks, environments is astonishing. Please keep encouraging others to focus on simplicity even if you don't get much support here.