Nathan, Thank you for your request.
I think we need to investigate if it is possible or not.
The reasons I used JOGL are:
1) low cpu usage (as it is hardware accelerated)
2) allows to add more UI effects for the future, such as other motions, camera position, light, blur, shadow, animated background so on.
3) These days it is popular to use DirectX or OpenGL to create this kind of UI effect. For example, Apple's Cover Flow or Windows' Flip 3D does not work/show without DirectX or OpenGL.
One thing we may want to do is creating SWT emulation version of OpenGL. Or, creating SWT version of 3D library like Java3D or Papervision3D. We may need a better UI layer to do this kind of thing.