What I find most amusing is that there is a 'Pro Mode' button on that dialog!

There would have to be. This is wget we're talking about. It's a very advanced downloading and mirroring tool, with way more functionality than you could ever cram into a dialog box that would fit on the screen. (I imagine the Pro Mode box must be a tabbed interface. One boggles. Either that or it's a big fat textarea where the user types in the arguments to be passed to wget on the command line, which incidentally is roughly what I'd design if I someone held me at gunpoint and forced me to design a UI for wget for MacOS 9.)

Hmm while there are some pretty hairy things in that dialog, I have to
say that a big dialog with loads of controls on it is prolly the best
type of design for a wget gui.

Frankly, the only UI that will ever make any sense for wget is the command line interface (and the config files of course). Making a GUI for it is inherently silly. End users are never going to have any use for most of its functionality, even the subset shown in that ridiculous dialog above. Frankly -c (the "continue that previously interrupted download where it left off" option, a bona fide life saver for dialup users) is the only option (beyond the URL to retrieve, of course) that an end user is ever going to want. The rest of the functionality is all poweruser stuff, and they can consult the documentation and use the command line.

If the wget GUI looks like this, I'd hate to see the source.

You misunderstand. This GUI was not created by the wget developers, but by a third party. wget is a command-line tool, and was never intended for end users. Making a GUI for wget is kind of like making a GUI for grep.

You don't see FTP clients all centering around that idea, despite
the being the same in concept!

That's really unfair. Normal ftp clients don't do the stuff wget was designed to do. Some of them have one or two of wget's niftier and more generally applicable features (e.g., some have retry, and I saw one once that had resume), but complaining that wget doesn't have a nice end-userey interface like ws_ftp is sort of like complaining that a recording studio mixer with sixty channels is harder to use than the single volume knob on a basic boombox. There are bazillions of simple GUI-oriented download tools out there, some better than others, but wget is not trying to compete in that space. It serves an altogether different purpose.

In fairness, you're not the only one to fail to understand that. In fact, I'm pretty sure the creator of this wGetGUI thing didn't get it either.

I'd like to see some other examples people have run across along the way.

I wish I had a screenshot of the configuration interface for Polaris (the library automation system). Hoo boy. Fortunately it only ever has to be used by system administators, but even so it's quite painful to use. I suspect a lot of line-of-business software has some pretty bad UI, actually, because the developers typically assume it never has to be used by anyone who doesn't receive specific training for it. (Of course employees in most industries usually don't get nearly the training they ought to have, but that's the difference between theory and practice for you.)

Come to that, Visual Studio Dot Net has some pretty bad UI in it too. I'm thinking particularly of its UI for creating Reporting Services rdl files (the things that specify how the data returned from a database query should be layed out on paper as a report). Writing the XML by hand would almost be easier. Actually, with a decent text editor and a good reference book on the format it might be.

Or the Windows 98 interface for installing hardware drivers. Remember that little dance? Click Start. Click Settings-Control Panel. Double-click System. Click Device Manager. Select the device in question. Click Update Driver. Click Next. Click "let me select the correct driver", because the find-one-automatically option pretty much never ever works right. Click Next. Click Have Disk. Click Browse. Wait for it to scan the floppy drive, even though there's clearly no diskette in there. Click drive C: and so forth until you find the directory where you unzipped the manufacturer's drivers. Click around randomly in the directory hierarchy there until you find the folder with the correct .inf file. Click okay. For each associated driver file it can't find, repeat the last five steps (starting with "Click Browse", above). Then for each file it wants from the Windows CD, repeat those steps again only with the path for that. Reboot and pray that it actually works. Bwahahahaha. (There are people out there who will look at you with a straight face and claim Windows XP is not an improvement over Windows 98. One wonders if they've somehow managed to completely avoid ever needing to do a reinstall.)

There is one thing, much, much worse then having the UI designed
by a developer: having the UI designed by a graphic designer.

I wholeheartedly concur. I've seen that, and it's wretched in the extreme. Among other evils you get icons that look nice enough but don't communicate squat, rigidly inflexible layouts that break in horrible ways as soon as you populate them with real-world data, controls that do a perfectly standard thing but for no earthly reason are just gratuitously different enough from the usual standard widgets that users have to be specifically trained on them, important controls that users don't see because they look like mere design elements, and other things that look like important controls that ought to do something useful but turn out to be just decoration.

Ditto the comment about the 'Pro Mode' button. I want to see what that does.

You can probably get some idea by reading the wget man page. (For Unix-challenged readers, you can just google the words wget man page and find a copy of the relevant document online.)

wget has a ton of options, but really only a few that you use often.

Talk to a hundred different wget users, and you'll get at least eighty different lists of which options they use often. That's the problem. In fact, you see that big fat dialog box at the top? It's actually missing one of the options I use most often (specifically, I don't see any UI for the -p option, which is really handy and probably the option I use next-most-often after -c).

It also doesn't do anything you couldn't do with firefox and a few
million years to spare

Actually it does. Quite a lot. In order to get the full functionality of wget you'd need, in addition to Firefox and a whole lot of spare time, a text editor (to do things like -k), a file manager, an ftp client (for active ftp), and a Firefox extension to preserve the http headers, plus the Web Developer Toolbar, and that's just off the top of my head. Also I'm not sure Firefox's network options are really configurable enough, even with about:config, to do some of the things wget can manage, so you might also need LWP or somesuch. Come to think of it, if you need wget, then you need wget. Firefox is really completely inadequate. The only real competition for wget that I'm aware of is curl.

A lot of these comments act like wget is just a file downloading utility, but that's missing the whole point. If you want a downloading utility with an easy-to-learn GUI and a small handful of options, then you are clearly not part of the target audience for wget.