That’s been my opinion of auto-layout too … in theory it should be awesome, but configuring it is ridiculously complex. Every iteration of IB seems to make some of the process easier, but adds more bells and whistles, keeping the workload the same.

There are some alternative UI layout/rendering frameworks … I took a brief look at Texture last weekend and it looks nice, but has its own learning curve. Facebook's ComponentKit looks similar. Both are iOS only though.

(I found both of those through the Awesome iOS directory. There is an Awesome-MacOS as well, but unfortunately it’s focused more on end-user apps, not APIs.)

—Jens