That said there's simplicity to Iced being pure rust managed through cargo that I enjoy. Though it should be said that my "learning curve" for Iced was much lower than it might be for others as I discovered it well after I'd adopted Elm (which inspired Iced) and - independently - Rust, so Iced was pretty easy for me to grok.
I don't think there's a right/wrong way there to be honest, both approaches have their pro's/con's, and my main issues with Iced vs Qt is largely a matter of maturity/prevalence than any specifics with the implementations/workflow themselves.
I've always been curious about productizing apps like these, from a financial/business perspective have you found Daino worthwhile or enough of a success (by your standards) to continue developing it as a proprietary application?
Not really, not yet. Once my FOSS app was popular I used to earn a livable amount of money from ads on the website. But after a SEO crash that all went down the drain and the money I'm getting now from subscriptions to Daino Notes is nice but not livable. I've been working the last year (at a really awesome place) doing React programming (my first salary job, actually) and at nights and weekends working on Daino.
I actually got many requests to license Daino Notes' block editor. So I've figured there's a business there. I'm working on something I'm calling Daino Qt which is a collection of different components to accelerate Qt apps development (so I'm also its client). It will include my block editor, components for mobile - current Qt components on mobile are extremly shitty - so I'm planning on changing that with things like native-feeling swipeable stack view, native-feeling text editing, etc. And maybe Qt C++ client SDK for InstantDB (and more stuff).
Hope I can sell this as well while also consuming these components for Daino Notes and other apps I will develop.