The version of the story I was told that the Maemo/Moblin mashup was just as bad as the idea of combining two different frameworks that do essentially the same thing sounds like, nowhere near production ready, and the Harmattan aka MeeGo-branded Maemo with Qt was the only way it could be made to work at all. I haven't heard anyone say that genuine MeeGo would make things better.
That was the sentiment of my comment as well, I guess I weren't clear enough - Nokia N9 was made to work great on what technically was still Maemo, but since they were supposed to go with MeeGo afterwards it would still require a lot of work to actually do that.
Ok, I misunderstood. I thought it was clear at that point that Meego was a dead end, but Harmattan was missing things like app sandboxing and some app store and payment related features, the package management was a mess, etc.
Its funny that things like running videos while sliding window out of screen and live task switch all worked. But somehow package management was the problem. When I developed for iOS I was shocked how non of that existed.
Seems to me they had something really nice to go forward with.
Priorities tend to shift when your whole team has already been laid off, the product line cancelled and you still have the ability to make something flashy to put on your CV (again, I wasn't there myself). And probably there were a few demosceners in the team. But to be honest, the smoothness of the UI was really impressive, and even more when you know how underpowered the CPU was compared to Android phones at the time.
