I think that gnustep has left behind the user experience during this years in favors of portability.
In my opinion, users and developers choose cocoa, firstly for the user experience.
We need a properly backed drawing for smooth animations and maybe an accelerated window compositor (if GNUstep choose the "we are a desktop" roadmap).
What do you think guys about an hardware accelerated drawing?
Cairo is great, but is missing some important feature for modern UI.
Currently is not possible to do blurs or shadows, animation are slow and I think that this influence the overall experience of GNUstep.
I know that is possible to use cairo trough OpenGL but right now is missing all the image filter part..
I have looked at Skia, the graphic library used by google chrome:
seems very nice and has already implemented most image filter directly on GPU
my two cents
Riccardo