title: Custom Swing look and feel vs. custom components?
body: <p>I'm writing a game using Swing and want to achieve a distinctive "steampunk" inspired look for the GUI. This will require some animated components, chunky metallic borders etc.</p>
  
  <p>I know that I can get nice effects by overriding paintComponent and doing all of my rendering for custom lightweight components in that method.</p>
  
  <p>Is this the way to go, or should I be looking at developing a whole new pluggable Look and Feel?</p>
  
  <p>What are the pros/cons of each?</p>