I use Void now, after trying almost everything there is under the sun... and it's a good choice for me ATM. And as Arch and other distros that leave you at the terminal and you do whatever you wanna do after that, it makes no assumptions. So, as I said, I'm not angry or afraid about anything. I just don't like the pushy aspect of Wayland almost every other distro has taken.

Hard to develop new features when X is so long in the tooth.

I do agree with that, absolutely. But I was hoping for a more polished user experience from Wayland, which isn't the case, not even now. Some things work, some don't 🤷. Excuse me, but when you push something as important as a display server, you should really think long and hard about things like this. You can't just throw it in the wild and insist on it being the new default when it's far from a polished product.

The writing has been on the wall about the death of X11 for a long time, now. No one stepped up to fork it or take over maintenance. So it goes. But this is Linux, so you're free to run it forever. Or even fork and maintain it yourself.

That is true, and I was really hoping Wayland would have almost all of the features of X11 implemented in it (like PipeWire did with PulseAudio). As it turns out, this was never even the plan. The plan was, make something completely new (fine, that was the idea anyway) but not make it backwards compatible... OK, we'll throw a few plugins here and there for backwards compatibility, but that's it folks, we don't plan on working on anything X11 related any more. This is one of the things that actually bugs me about the project. It's like the freaking GNOME devs have written this thing, we do what we like, and if you like it, jump on board. You don't? Well, tough luck 🤷.