> instead of even trying to provide feature parity, they basically dumped all that responsibility onto the WM/DE devs.
In other words, the Wayland people should perhaps have defined official protocol extensions early on to cover most of what X did, thus preventing all the initial interop issues when Gnome and KDE and Sway tried to reinvent them independently.
In hindsight, it's my opinion that wayland, if it had to exist at all, should have been implemented like this:
1. Add GBM to graphics drivers and start working it up the stack from the bottom, stopping at Xorg. That is, make rootful XWayland the standard Xorg before standalone even is a thing. This reduces maintenance work up front rather than belatedly.
2.a. Implement weston as a standalone compositor.
2.b. Actually make weston fully functional. Figure out everything needed to provide an actual working desktop environment with the features that users expect out of the box. Standardize all the protocols needed for at least a basic XFCE-ish environment rather than hoping someone else will do it.
3. Then, only after these things are done and working, announce to the world that wayland, a quiet project that has until now explicitly suggested nobody use it, is now the future of linux graphical systems and everyone should plan to migrate.