I of course see people here and there on forums express discontent, but I don't think that demographic is big enough to drive both significant development and the adoption that makes development sustainable.
Wayland is only one of the many Gnome desktop feature and technical decisions that not everyone agrees with. Some decisions are regressions, and outright defective, for years and counting.
There's an awkward situation, in which the companies paying for the programmers effectively get to decide, and the governance doesn't necessarily reflect the user base. But, like "they who has the gold, makes the rules", they who does the work...
So the healthy competition comes in when someone someone can afford to spend time to build alternatives. Sometimes expending effort just to undo changes of someone else, on a fork.
For example, when Gnome decided to take the desktop behavior in their own creative direction, the Cinnamon project gave everyone back a more familiar and intuitive desktop, which continued to work with all the application programs that people had been using.
(Strangely, Cinnamon seems more an enterprise-desktop look&feel drop-in replacement than the default Gnome desktop. When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop as their first priority, and then second priority would be mobile. But I don't see the default Gnome desktop getting them either. Cinnamon, on the other hand, is immediately usable by any corporate worker who's used any Microsoft desktop since Windows 95.)
Already a decade ago, I commented on a news-for-nerds site like this one, “Well, GNOME makes choices we don’t like, but they are focused on the corporate-desktop market.” But then a GNOME developer replied to correct me: “That’s an old misconception, we are not mainly focused on the corporate desktop”. So who exactly they are designing for, remains a mystery to me.
You must not be that curmudgeonly! I haven't tried Wayland yet, and so long as people are still arguing about it, I'm too afraid to even try it. :-)
A lot. I have no idea how to start "Wayland" on Slackware. I use FVWM.
OTOH, i saw Wayland in Tails. It is slow and ugly as hell, window managent is nonexistent.
it seems to have better display scaling which is useful when I switch between large monitor and laptop screen.
It’s really disappointing how often disagreements in the open source world turn into religious wars. I think it’s because so many would rather yell and scream than contribute a single line of code. So much wasted energy.