I found that iMusic widget, Dolphin, TuneWiki and many themes don't play well with GDE. When I installed/used them, I had all kinds of problems. Took them off, and the problems disappear.
I agree.... "Is it the chicken or the egg?"
Sometimes GDE gets blamed for bad programming when in fact they have accomplished amazing feats and its the other things added after the fact that could be bad.
My Cube works perfect... No black screens, no hangups.... once in a blue moon I will have a delay and the screen is black until everything on the screen loads.. but thats pretty rare.
I don't have any of the problem apps or widgets you mentioned above and I try to use shortcuts rather than widgets because it seems widgets are like little programs running in the background that control its parent program, whereas as shortcut does nothing until you use it.
I use an app killer to wipe off progs every so often... you can tell it which ones to ignore and never wipe... "like gmail, alarmclock, my sms app,etc"... everything else can go until I want to open it again.
Even as many trashy progs on your computer try to take over your desktop and make shortcut bars and place add infested malware in general............. even so, it looks like we are going to have to deal with apps that don't want to shut off, want to keep your gps activated for no good reason, want to keep running in the background and stay running just because you opened it one time "shopsavvy is bad for that" corporate calendar also like to run.. its nice to be able to kill them if you never use them and have never even set them up... whats up with that?
Seems like unscrupulous Devs try and take advantage of all the cpu power and abilities of a computer or smartphone to reach thier objectives to make a buck rather than be a service that serves the customer and then sell that service.
CPUs get faster and apps and programs get trashier and bigger with less and less effort for excellence to write good quality code.
Everyone is out there trying to make a quick easy buck and so some of the apps will be released without respect for the user who buys it because they are only out for their own interest.
It won't be long we may need a program like CCleaner "crap cleaner".. that also cleans the registry from all the irresponsible left over trash of bad program uninstalls. Until then "Advanced Task Killer" is a necessity.
Its true Android does very well juggling everything, but when you start tossing in apps that really show off the capabilities of the Droid, it just doesn't make sense to allow 15 other apps to run all the time when they are not needed.