James: YaST is written in C++ and YCP (Yast Control Protocol), a interpreted script language (a middle thing between C and tcl and LPC perhaps). It meanwhile also has perl bindings (and likely others can be added too.)
Also, SUSE and Novell ship both KDE and GNOME even favoured now, so this choice is left to the user.
And I don't get the YaST QT vs GTK question? Both are fine GUI toolkits. Oh and did you know that YaST has an ncurses GUI frontend? This is what I use usually.
It took me one day to relax from my hate of Mozilla and GNOME regarding Mozilla browser maintenance timeframe issues. Not a good sign. But at least we will no longer ship galeon and I try to get rid of epiphany too. (We can not supply Mozilla updates without breaking them. And we cannot update them due to their gtk2 version requirements. In distributions which are just ONE YEAR old now!)
I would just like to kill every package using mozilla libraries from the future distros and just have Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird as toplevel apps (where we can easily do version updates).
Thats just the normal problem you get from such massive monsters. What happened to small and just one task?