Though I sympathise - the sheer amount of effort to work with these, be it X11 or Wayland, is really annoying; the pure Ruby X11 gem I use is more lines of code than the window manager itself...
Also since all the prepackaged wayland libs are heavy users of functions declared as `static inline` I have to create shims for those as they are not linkable. That part is a pain in the ass but pretty simple to resolve :)
And yeah, there is so much to set up just to get a bare minimum going. I guess that would be true in X11 too.
I like that there are no other dependencies, but I'd have sacrificed that if it was sufficiently much easier than the route I ended up taking (e.g. my terminal did start out linking to Xlib and using a tiny C extension; it's since been ripped out in favour of the pure Ruby bindings, since why not now that it's available, but it was a perfectly ok solution to start with).