I'm not well-organized enough to manually track GUI components for hand assembly. OTOH, I've yet so see a GUI code builder for
Java that didn't cheat and slip in some proprietary classes and often build some pretty dumb code at that.
The way I got around it was to use the Visual Cafe GUI builder (remember Visual Cafe? Circa Y2k?). It produced the GUI for me, but with the usual vendor slop in it. Then I ran the generated code through a Perl script I hacked out that converted the vender-specific code to generic Swing code and got rid of the logical that was totally brain-dead (It also converted absolute gridbaglayout code to relative code so it would be easier to hand-maintain).
I haven't done this lately. I think Visual Cafe can still be made to work, though. If not, the same tricks can be applied to many of the newer Swing code generators.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.