The problem is what can be considered cool?
Is Max 5's gui cool?  maybe for someone and for someone else not.
In a open community is really hard to decide but quite more rich the process. Because it is not plane but it consider cultural/historical/tecnological differences.
When I start  my fist workshops with PD in 2006 it was a mess work with different platfoms and OS versions (out of pd-vanila and Gem mostly); or just install pd external in some case (do you remember how was tricky install pdp, for example, in a mac in 2006?).
Today for me is very easy during the workshops. And that because the process that this community is doing. Now I see many different developper branch: I guess the direction is have a pdlib fully working and take out all the GUI code from the pdcore.
In this way we will not have to decide and impose to others one gui, one language, one way to work with pd but many different approaches will born (I'm imaging different GUIs with different language - qt, html5, gtk)
So, all this boring word to say is just a process, and if you want to push it on some direction is up to you (general you and not to Bernardo :)

my two cents
husk