We're stuck at the same level of abstraction because the platform forces us to. The base html/css controls are incredibly simplistic, to the point of being pretty much useless for building proper UI. Everyone is struggling with how to abstract their way around this fact.
You have solutions like gwt, cappucino and extjs which build custom ui components that behave properly, ad the infrastructure to tie them together. This works, but only if you never step outside the framework, and only if you're willing to deal with bloat, which sucks. Then you have frameworks which just give you the infrastructure, not the custom ui components, like ember or backbone. That also works, but because html's core controls are horrible the only way to get a great ui out of that is to build really custom ui, essentially rebuilding what the complicated frameworks already provide out of the box, which sucks. And then you have one-shot solutions that try to bring just one or a few ui elements to the web, trying their best to fit into the raw platform. That also works, but because the raw platform is so painful to use, it doesn't scale.
Really, the problem is that html/css/js is the wrong base for building abstractions on. I have great hopes for shadow dom and web components, but that's only the beginning of what we need. The platform itself needs to evolve a great deal to make building high-quality ui something that doesn't lock you into a vendor's toolset.
Personally i chose extjs and am waiting it out until the platform matures underneath it. I'd like to see the extjs codebase evaporate as parts of it get replaced by native code, until it's nothing but syntactical sugar on top of a rich base platform. That's going to be a while though.
You have solutions like gwt, cappucino and extjs which build custom ui components that behave properly, ad the infrastructure to tie them together. This works, but only if you never step outside the framework, and only if you're willing to deal with bloat, which sucks. Then you have frameworks which just give you the infrastructure, not the custom ui components, like ember or backbone. That also works, but because html's core controls are horrible the only way to get a great ui out of that is to build really custom ui, essentially rebuilding what the complicated frameworks already provide out of the box, which sucks. And then you have one-shot solutions that try to bring just one or a few ui elements to the web, trying their best to fit into the raw platform. That also works, but because the raw platform is so painful to use, it doesn't scale.
Really, the problem is that html/css/js is the wrong base for building abstractions on. I have great hopes for shadow dom and web components, but that's only the beginning of what we need. The platform itself needs to evolve a great deal to make building high-quality ui something that doesn't lock you into a vendor's toolset.
Personally i chose extjs and am waiting it out until the platform matures underneath it. I'd like to see the extjs codebase evaporate as parts of it get replaced by native code, until it's nothing but syntactical sugar on top of a rich base platform. That's going to be a while though.