Most users want a UI from $CURRENT_YEAR, not one that makes them think of Spice Girls songs and AOL Instant Messenger.
> Wayland forces it down your throat, either you like it or not, whereas X11 enables it but doesn't mandate it so if you dislike it you just don't use it.
X11 is architecturally ill suited to a compositing environment. Inasmuch as compositing solutions exist, they are janky hacks that introduce more processes, more context switches on the hot path, and more latency than Wayland, which was based on $CURRENT_DECADE graphical principles from the ground up.
Sometimes you can't square the circle and engineer a general solution. Sometimes you have to engineer for the common case only. For desktop usage, the common case is "user who is used to Windows or macOS and does not want to regress backward in terms of UI". For such users, a noncomposited Windows 9x-like desktop is unacceptable. A broken, laggy, hard-to-maintain pile of hacks is also unacceptable. Wayland solves both those problems, which is why virtually ALL of the hackers working on the Linux graphics stack have jumped ship from X to Wayland. Like it or not, you will eventually be using Wayland too.
> Most users want a UI from $CURRENT_YEAR, not one that makes them think of Spice Girls songs and AOL Instant Messenger.
This is rather incorrect assumption. UIs is not something people want, it's something people want to not to get in their way, i.e. the opposite of wanting. And to your example modern Gnome is actually worse than AOL times UIs, it breaks a lot of expectations users used to Mac or Windows have, with proper menus not hidden away and better workflows.
Most users want a UI from $CURRENT_YEAR, not one that makes them think of Spice Girls songs and AOL Instant Messenger.
> Wayland forces it down your throat, either you like it or not, whereas X11 enables it but doesn't mandate it so if you dislike it you just don't use it.
X11 is architecturally ill suited to a compositing environment. Inasmuch as compositing solutions exist, they are janky hacks that introduce more processes, more context switches on the hot path, and more latency than Wayland, which was based on $CURRENT_DECADE graphical principles from the ground up.
Sometimes you can't square the circle and engineer a general solution. Sometimes you have to engineer for the common case only. For desktop usage, the common case is "user who is used to Windows or macOS and does not want to regress backward in terms of UI". For such users, a noncomposited Windows 9x-like desktop is unacceptable. A broken, laggy, hard-to-maintain pile of hacks is also unacceptable. Wayland solves both those problems, which is why virtually ALL of the hackers working on the Linux graphics stack have jumped ship from X to Wayland. Like it or not, you will eventually be using Wayland too.