Application development on a web platform meant for documents is inherently a hack, but the evolution of the ecosystem is reaching a point where many of the hacks are quite good. There's just a lot of inertia from existing codebases and developers used to the previous ways of doing things, and FUD from places like Google with Angular and Polymer.
Web development seems to be particularly suited to the model of building a hack, then pouring concrete over it, then building the next layer of hacks on top.
Web development seems to be particularly suited to the model of building a hack, then pouring concrete over it, then building the next layer of hacks on top.