> With Wayland, even if I start with an existing compositor, the barrier is far larger, and everything changes.

I mean, no one puts a gun against your head to use Wayland, X will be on life support for decades and will likely work without any issue.

But with this stance, no evolution could ever happen and every change would be automatically "bad". Sure, changes have a downside of course, but that shouldn't deter us in every case.

Plenty of evolution can happen. The problem with Wayland to me is that it's not evolution, but a step backward. It's forcing a tremendous amount of boilerplate and duplication of code.

X can evolve both by extensions and by "pseudo extensions" that effectively tell the server it's okay to make breaking changes to the protocol. There are also plenty of changes you could just make and accept the breakage because the clients it's break are limited.

I don't mind breaking changes if they actually bring me benefits I care about, but to me Wayland is all downside and no upsides that matter to me.