The problem with Symbian is it's image more than anything else. As much as I think renaming Maemo 6 to MeeGo is a misnomer, I also think that Symbian^3 (and ^4) should have been called something completely different, to eliminate all the bad taste which actually originated from S60.

Forget S60 and AVKON. Seriously, just forget it, it's dead, let it rest in peace.

In the Symbian^3+ era, you will be coding serious stuff in Qt even for midrange devices, and that's a completely different affair than that that caused all the grey hair on seasoned S60 developers.

If you take a look at the breadth of the MeeGo platform, you will see that it is an utter overkill for anything but top-end devices. Symbian, OTOH, will do VERY WELL on the midrange devices of 2010H2, 2011+ and will be reinvigorated by cross-pollination via Qt. My biggest concern/hope is that Uiemo and MeeGo Touch get united/bridged at some point to minimize fragmentation.

(On a side note, a very-very long shot is that Intel Medfield next year turns everything upside down and Nokia's MeeGo division shifts to being X86 centric - in that case, the divison will look more like Symbian=ARM, MeeGo=X86, but I'm in 2012 by now, so I'll take it easy and return to the present to end my post )