> * I've yet to see any actual, honest to god benefits for the end user. Literally everything I've seen is the fact that it makes development easier for the wayland devs and harder for literally everyone else.

When Wayland was proposed, it’s biggest benefit was for direct rendering. At the time AIGLX was still the main hack to getting decent compositing/GL performance and had some major drawbacks. Wayland was designed in a manner more similar to the DRs in other desktop OSes (Windows and OS X, primarily). But, in its long development and adoption period, X’s DRI/DRM infrastructure has had plenty of time to mature and many of those arguments have been made moot. In fact, it still generally outperforms Wayland in many cases:

https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-510-wayland/2

Theoretically Wayland is still conceptually superior in that regard; but you’re right, it hasn’t shown the drastic improvement originally promised.