Immediate mode GUI is fine for quick and dirty things, but once you start dealing with multiple application views that conditionally show/hide, with branching flows of any kind, you'll find yourself on a hardline track to reinvent retained mode GUI from scratch just so you can handle the event loop in a sane way.
Object oriented, event driven widgets composed into more colored views are really, really good for developing UI. There's a reason every major OS GUI toolkit is this design. If you componentize like you are supposed to--instead of just smashing everything into one form--they work and can be reasoned over with few surprises.
The trouble comes from not componentizing things that you should when your current platform doesn't provide the full menagerie of widgets that you'll need. Basically, it you have any kind of input that results in a value that is not just a raw string, you should be building a component for that input: URLs, paths to files, numbers, dates, selectors for picking a set list of structured objects, etc.
Object oriented, event driven widgets composed into more colored views are really, really good for developing UI. There's a reason every major OS GUI toolkit is this design. If you componentize like you are supposed to--instead of just smashing everything into one form--they work and can be reasoned over with few surprises.
The trouble comes from not componentizing things that you should when your current platform doesn't provide the full menagerie of widgets that you'll need. Basically, it you have any kind of input that results in a value that is not just a raw string, you should be building a component for that input: URLs, paths to files, numbers, dates, selectors for picking a set list of structured objects, etc.