Linux

Give me a compositor with at least some of the capabilities of Awesome

KDE Plasma.

and some none alpha-quality VNC solutions

The one from KDE.

And before you call me uninformed, please explain to me why per-window custom shaders are a necessity (i.e. overwhelmingly useful and irreplacable) for anyone. And furthermore, what anything you said has to do with me questioning the necessity of not maintaining, but reimplementing X.

I never said anything about Awesome or any X WM, I didn't even say anything about people sticking with an X environment. I commented on a post about a new X implementation, because I wondered why people go out of their way to keep X around, after its own maintainers declared it abandonware.