That could work fine in Qt because it is a backend toolkit. Remember that LCL serves as a wrapper of a lot of backends and therefore need to adapt to all of them, the LCL way is indeed to use the autosizing / layout which is very flexible. What difficulties are you facing? It's indeed complicated, but you don't need to understand all of them, simply pick the ones you need. I simply use AutoSize := true on almost all controls and anchors them according to my needs, perhaps using ChildSizing for grouping controls (e.g. TGroupBox) and that's all.