The big mistake with W was leaving so much of function specification to the implementor. W was a spec, but totally incomplete for what was needed to build a usable power user desktop. The Linux DE landscape was already fractured to the degree of inefficiency for such a small user base, and with W this fracture actually deepened due to the Great Unsharing of implementation details. Nothing global. Everything local, from decorations to whatnot. Now, besides competing implementations of an entire display server stack, you have the huge communications & politics overhead between the camps that is required to agree on such simple "protocols" like "inhibit screensaver start" (the "idle-inhibit wars") --- not a good use of resources.
I think the future of X11 will be that if a vendor --- likely Nvidia --- sees any point in it down the road, they'll fork Xorg and provide, complete with their own driver bundle, the display server.
For now, no vendor of drivers like Nvidia is likely to be concerned about X11 stabilizing because that's less toil for them to keep their drivers stable on Linux. They are busy enough with keeping up with the Linux kernel breaking their stuff every release <--- not a great advertisement for vendors to even support Linux; looked the same with X11 to me during the 2008-2015 period. Changing X11 was not economical to support without a great justification.
Some software is finished --- maybe it's time to call X11 finished.
With W I assume you mean Wayland? You comment is confusing because the W Window System [1] is in fact the predecessor of X11 and that's what I thought you were referring to.
I think the future of X11 will be that if a vendor --- likely Nvidia --- sees any point in it down the road, they'll fork Xorg and provide, complete with their own driver bundle, the display server.
For now, no vendor of drivers like Nvidia is likely to be concerned about X11 stabilizing because that's less toil for them to keep their drivers stable on Linux. They are busy enough with keeping up with the Linux kernel breaking their stuff every release <--- not a great advertisement for vendors to even support Linux; looked the same with X11 to me during the 2008-2015 period. Changing X11 was not economical to support without a great justification.
Some software is finished --- maybe it's time to call X11 finished.