That's exactly why I am commenting on these topics, asking questions and posting new ideas. 

Thank you for the references. That looks promising... let's see what GWT goes for.

I had already read your post on the documentation topic, agree with it and voted for it.

Although UI frameworks are very important, they can be used independently from GWT. I have used Bootstrap in several projects with GWT and I prefer to use the updated (pure) version of Bootstrap, instead of using GwtBootstrap3. It is natural that such projects came up, but I don't think they should be a part of GWT. It is still great that they exist and developers can optionally use it.

A Maven (or Gradle, or...) starter is crucial, but it does not reduce the importance of an IDE plugin. The current GWT Plugin for Eclipse works great and allows creating a project with GWT project with sample code using Maven or Ant. Those web projects do the job, but it is an inferior development experience compared to IDE integration. Besides, the plugin goes further than a starter - it does code completion, coding help, highlighting, running development mode with jetty shortcuts, easily managing project settings and shortcuts to create ClientBundle, Modules, UiBinder (always with sample code that helps a lot), etc.

I will unfortunately not be at the conference. Will there be a chance to join it online? Even if only for watching, it would be great!

Good luck on that, Colin! There will certainly be many GWT-RPC supporters at the conference. I would be very interested in checking your work.

Wouldn't it be nicer if it would be a complete solution that a newcomer gets into immediately? Maybe that's a different topic, concerning the improvement of http://www.gwtproject.org and documentation available.

A good workflow for a developer would be:

1. Search for GWT and find http://www.gwtproject.org/

2. On the website easily find the "Get started" page (the site and menu structure are fine at the moment, but the content is confusing, fragmented and outdated)

3. There is an IDE plugin, one can easily install, which helps the developer through the install process and creating a sample project with Maven (or other), code samples, client-server communication, UI example, etc. 

GWT used to be as simple as that.

Independently of the technologies used, the easiness of getting started, the supporting tools and good documentation should be the focus. Otherwise, it just gets overwhelming and developers will opt for other solutions. GWT should not become just the glue that gets several alternative github projects together, that will not work in the long run

It is great to hear that there will be a talk about GWT-RPC! There are many use cases where I use RESTful, but for the communication between client and server on GWT I still prefer GWT-RPC. It is easy to use and it handles a lot of work that a developer would not like to do (or would do it incompletely).

Clearly there is criticism around GWT-RPC, but the arguments do not sound reasonable. RESTful is naturally an alternative, but GWT-RPC has been very important for GWT. Will it change?