well, ive been working (not professionaly, at least, not yet) with mono since its early version 0.25, and ive been following mono development very closely, and i can say, it is really worth it. it implements the .NET framework very well, and yes, it has a minor support for SWF, using wine and winelib. but, now they will write it again from scratch as gdi+ and win32 api invokes support was in some cases, bad. but, give it another month, and you will have SWF implemented in mono. but, trust me, Gtk-sharp (Gtk#) rocks, as it is much more powerfull than SWF and i even might add, faster. as for the IDE there is MonoDevelop (monodevelop.com) and it is great, simple, easy to use, with builtin help, and support for many languages (java, c#, Nemerle, etc), it even has code completion (aka intellisense in VS). it also has support for ASP.net with their XSP web server, that once installed, you run the executable, and you're on! as simples as that, no IIS install needed, no configuration, etc. it works really well with TAO, an opengl binding for C#, so games are also a target product to be made with this platform. it is in constant development, so you can expect upgrades in short periods of time. give it a try, it is worth it :-)

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On the gui subject: why is gaming the only genre of computing where the widget sets must be recreated from scratch for every friggin' game?

Performance. No other reason. You don't need a fully featured GUI for games, so the performance hits associated with RAD-style GUI editors just aren't worth it.