Suggestion to split the Bitcoin application into two seperate parts, the engine (which bitcoind practically is already) and the GUI. The GUI would simply launch the engine upon startup and communicate with the engine via already existing RPC calls.

Lets say there are 50-100 software developers interested in contributing to the Bitcoin software, I estimate only about 10% will have the time/understanding to contribute useful C++ code, and of those doing the work a lot of it is spent fixing minor gui related issues.

If we can get the 10% C++ guru's working on the important "engine" changes, and adding more and more API/RPC calls, then the remaining 90% of weekend developers and script gurus can concentrate on nice GUI's in any language for any platform and additional user functionality.

The releases would still look the same, a bitcoin binary and a bitcoind binary, only difference is two processes will run rather than one.