Yes, they started with GTK+ and then they twisted it beyond recognition in many places. When a Debian GTK+ app is run under Maemo 5 in a chroot, it uses the standard GTK+ widgets to display, but Maemo 5 then mangles and disfigures the widgets into grotesque, unusable shapes.

Maemo also built (really nice) custom Hildon libraries on top of GTK+, but they did it in a way that ended up being the worst possible case for "standard" GTK+ apps. All the brokenness is in the standard GTK+ widgets, and all the elegant fixes for the brokenness are in the custom Hildon replacements. So, for example, there's no automatic conversion of big GTK+ dialog boxes that don't fit on the screen into the cool kinetically scrolling dialog boxes found in Hildon. The GTK+ dialog boxes just break horribly.

Another example: the standard "File Open" dialog box, under Maemo 5, is the most hideous thing you will ever see, because the OK button eats 1/4 of the space, and the file lists are tiny and unreadable with microscopic scroll bars... but most users of the N900 will never see that atrocity because all of the Maemo 5 apps have replaced it with the custom Hildon version that looks good on the device.

In Maemo 4, I was able to work around many of these problems because Hildon still displayed most of the GTK+ widgets correctly. It no longer does that in Maemo 5.

My only option is to try a secondary desktop environment, like the LXDE-in-Xephyr hack I used in the current Easy Debian. But because the screen is so small on the N900, I have to find a way to make everything in the secondary environment big and "chunky". I also need to figure out a way to get out of the secondary environment and back to Maemo, something that is proving to be quite challenging now that there is no hardware keys for toggling fullscreen mode or pulling up the task switcher.

Nokia has already announced that Maemo 6 will be QT-based. This might actually be a good thing for GTK+, because then apps using that toolkit will look "normal" again.