Were you running debug or release builds? Your experience with sluggishness is very atypical.

Very typical for debug builds though. It's really surprising how big the difference is! Especially on slow hardware. The last app I tested went from almost unusable sluggish to buttery smooth when changing from debug to profile/release mode.

Keep in mind that Flutter is an open-source project with an active community. There's nothing particularly special about the built-in widgets that the Flutter framework provides; other developers can make and publish their own widgets easily enough if the built-in widgets are insufficient.

And you don't know what you're talking about.

1. VMware was giving out a free product too (Player).

2. As chipx86 pointed out on his blog post, VMware Workstation and Fusion were profitable.

Player was crippled, to prompt purchase of Workstation.

Many people I know who were serious about managing their VMs virtual networks were using Virtual Box.

Player wasn't crippled. It just served a different purpose. It was never meant to be on the same level as VirtualBox or anything, and existed to be a simple "run this VM" application.