I've never used this, but from the screenshots it looks like a perfect candidate for a curses-type interface. Is there a good reason for using the extra resources required by the GUI?
Do you mean extra resources required by the GUI while capturing data? I've never captured traffic on a server using Ethereal/Wireshark. It's easier to use tcpdump to do that, save the captured data to a file, and then view that in Wireshark.
http://www.wireshark.org/docs/wsug_html_chunked/AppToolstcpd...
In some cases text/keyboard interfaces are better. Like for instance when editing case. In some other cases, graphical/mouse interface is better. Like for instance web browsing.
Command-line tools generally offer a larger language than GUI applications. And if that language is not enough, you can still combine them; something that is impossible with a GUI app.
(I know you can do modal dialogs, comboboxes, even graphics in a console, but most people seem to agree GUI is better for that)
It also used to be very Linux/Gtk-centric too, and part of me is sad that the focus is now on enabling proprietary platforms at the same level of robustness. But that's obviously a philosophy thing and I'm not the developer.
And to get to the point of the blog post: it's absolutely true that cross-platform sanity has never been part of Gtk+'s design goals. It's always (well, since Gnome 1.0) been a playground for stuff in Gnome, and work on other environments a secondary thing done mostly by volunteers.
From the perspective of an app developer, Qt is much (much!) cleaner in this regard. Though it gets that at the cost of staggering code size and build complexity. Really Qt has to duplicate the superset of features provided by all the supported environments. It does it, but I can't say it's pretty.