Because I likely dont think the things you relate to web software being unpleasant are inherent to the actual platform and can be fixed, both by 3rd parties producing better web based software and by the platforms themselves being fixed.
That combined with the advantages of having a single, cross platform runtime platform that is shared as opposed to owned as being too important to ignore, I think its silly that people have to consider writing the same app 3 times at a minimum to reach a reasonable portion of the audience.
My biggest issue with web apps is that I don't have control of the software -- someone else can unilaterally decide to change the interface or functionality from day to day. (GMail is an example of a case that regularly irritates me by doing this.)
While I appreciate what you're saying about a common, open runtime being valuable -- I've considered using a self-contained, special purpose browser as the GUI for a project before myself -- I feel like web apps give users less freedom ultimately. Even in the worst case proprietary desktop app with nasty DRM, I could resort to reverse engineering the executable on my machine to find out what it does if I really had to; as soon as you move the computation to a remote server, you're totally at the whim of the operator for the continued ability to even access the program.
Thats exactly what I meant by something that is not inherent to the platform, The example I used (brackets) is an application built primarily using web technologies that isnt served from a website / you have complete control over.
If you just want a common runtime, what's wrong with java apps
Oracle v. Google. By CLR I assume you mean the CLI, but only a fool would trust a "standard" controlled by MS and driven by a proprietary implementation, not to mention that the latest version doesn't even have a patent promise from them.
And all they had to do was pay Keker & Van Nest for two years, without knowing whether they'd win or not - and Google didn't even make a VM that can run Java apps!
Not to mention that Oracle has appealed, so we still don't know if Google is clear or not.
If you want to risk getting yourself or your company involved in that quagmire, by all means do so.
That sounds really unpleasant to me. Why on earth would you want to do that?