Chad Wanless is a programmer I have a lot of respect for, but while I would consider using ODCL for in-house applications, I wouldn't use it for any commercial products I was trying to put to market. The dependancy is just too scary for me. If Autodesk bought Chad out that'd be a different matter.
As for fancy gui's I currently just use a mix of dlls I write in VB with VLISP, otherwise I still use vanilla DCL which has the added bonus that you can write dialogs on the fly.
Mileages vary, this is mine.