"It think it’s spurious not to credit a level of dynamism for the quality of apps on Apple platforms over the years, and to be pedantic, the NeXT ones as well – many of which were considered the best on any platform at the time. To deny that, I feel, shows a lack of understanding of what has made the platform great all these years."

I wonder whether this is actually true (independent of the specific technical merits of dynamism, staticness and everything in-between). Apple had an ecosystem of high quality apps before the NeXT purchase on a platform so primitive it's hard to meaningfully describe it in 'dynamic vs static' terms. It had a culture of quality in visual, interactive and, uh, 'intestinal' design that matched what was produced for the then much more sophisticated WhateverStep platform. Conversely, other technically sophisticated platforms (say, .Net, Firefox XUL if we're to pick 'declarative UI' as a criterion) haven't produced a great deal of elegant or aesthetically pleasing apps over the years.

I can't claim a decade of experience of shipping an OS X app but I was also there for the Java honeymoon and spent some time reimplementing Foundation/AppKit/IB/EOModeller/EOF in Java. Your take on it sounds head-noddingly familiar but I don't find it as obvious you do the relationship between dynamism and quality is causal.