The exultation of consumeristic convenience & consumption above all else that surrounds this topic is such a powerful lesson in desire & influence & what gets voiced.

Externally, seeing chaos & churn is easy, takes no effort. Yes, a lot of screenshots & device emulation protocols were left undefined. But that doesn't seem like a weakness to me. The bazaar finds interesting good approaches, slowly, over time, by way of it's many voices. X extensions also evolved out of some organic growth as well, but gee it sure seems like everyone remotely involved says there's basically no more juice to squeeze, that the limitations of the architecture have come & are hard & fast (and that getting many modern necessities has been hell after hell).

Wayland's minimalism is such a great guard against running into deadends. It invents less, uses the OS more (rather than inventing it's own controllers), relies on protocols more. X had to be a perfect cathedral, and it got really far & severed many well, but issues like hidpi, multiple refresh rates, screen tearing a video seemed basically unsolvable. No one had purchase on the monolith to keep things moving forward, and something had to be done.

There really wasn't any choice. And it's almost certain a new monolith that tried to be X, that tried to do everything, would have fizzled. Letting the compositors figure stuff out slowly made success possible. Success, progress, has to mature. And that's hard and takes patience. And maybe people don't appreciate the wins, and this being unfrozen; but we were stuck where we were, we couldn't really budge at all, and we found a really smart way to start. Wayland is much less and that's huge. The bazaar iterating forwards is glorious & great, an exchange where we prevent crufting ourselves in like we had in the past.

Whatever the technical decisions are here (and I for one see huge wins), theres so many other concerns. Compositors can be remarkably complete for being absolutely tiny, because we actually use the OS now; that's a stunning win that doesn't affect users of a particular env, but actually means so much. Keeping the door open to new futures matters, and Wayland bestows that possibility, something of great importance. The political decision/merit to let protocols work things out over time, to find agreement & allow divergence is as important and even greater a win, a way to insure adaptability forwards, a colossal jump over X monocultures & monolith fiddling. Wayland's merit is that it makes sense in the world. That it is a basis for creation. It's easy as an end user to underrate that, to feel upset over a proprietary hardware vendors lagged adoption and your videoconferencing software's lazy negligence. A viable open ended future isn't much comfort to present suffering. It's still stunning to me the vehemence of such avid consumerdom, such strong consumeristic expectation, such unbroked unwillingness to face difficulty, and such staunch tying oneself to the past. I'm so excited for this future - difficulties and discovery and all - and I want to much to see some respect & appreciation for the technical & political merits of Wayland, of the bazaar, of figuring stuff out, of improving. It matters.