Maybe you make the "mistake" to compare XPages to technologies outside of the Domino world. From a Domino perspective XPages can work quite well.
But the technology (accept nsf access) was available as Lotus Component Designer / Workplace Designer bundled with WAS / Workplace for years. It failed and is now reborn with less resource hunger within Domino. That does not make it less attractive but I think that outside of the IBM Lotus world XPages is just one technology out of many. The advantage of XPages is that IBM is really fixing stuff and they are adding new things. So this is really moving forward (at least for now).
As For Designer 8.5. It does not like to connect to my Linux servers over DSL, only local development works acceptable. 8.5.1 maybe is going in a public beta next month. I think this will be the Designer version you want.
Maybe you make the "mistake" to compare XPages to technologies outside of the Domino world. From a Domino perspective XPages can work quite well.
But the technology (accept nsf access) was available as Lotus Component Designer / Workplace Designer bundled with WAS / Workplace for years. It failed and is now reborn with less resource hunger within Domino. That does not make it less attractive but I think that outside of the IBM Lotus world XPages is just one technology out of many. The advantage of XPages is that IBM is really fixing stuff and they are adding new things. So this is really moving forward (at least for now).
As For Designer 8.5. It does not like to connect to my Linux servers over DSL, only local development works acceptable. 8.5.1 maybe is going in a public beta next month. I think this will be the Designer version you want.