It can be simultaneously true that Wayland can be viable, and that Wayland's foundation is still broken and lacking. Same as X11. I think the frustration for devs is having to support _both_ broken platforms; at least X11's failures and shortcomings are known and mostly unchanging. Wayland keeps breaking new things downstream in the process of adding features or resolving problems.
But this:
> for a relatively normal set of desktop needs
The problem is that there's no such thing on desktop. There are _commonalities_ between many users, but even in just the web browser space there are app-side hacks and workarounds just to get about 90% of the functionality that browsers expect on other platforms.
Even in your list, most desktop users don't need an IDE or do photography work. Many don't need "games", and "games" itself is such a broad category of things, each of which presents new and exciting Wayland wrinkles and limitations to ram face-first into.
Hell, I can't run KDE on F39 without a constantly running XWayland recording bridge for desktop commonalities that use or require screen sharing (Zoom, Discord, etc.).
And most of the issues might start with the Wayland project, but they're exacerbated by Qt and GNOME problems, whether it's doing little to nothing and holding back every dependent app (Qt) or constantly coming up with new and exciting ways to break or deviate from the protocol (GNOME). Those bottlenecks aren't new, but they're magnified by Wayland's slow-moving chaos, and drawn into relief by X11 Just Working because the hacks and garbage workarounds are damn near 40 years old.
But this:
> for a relatively normal set of desktop needs
The problem is that there's no such thing on desktop. There are _commonalities_ between many users, but even in just the web browser space there are app-side hacks and workarounds just to get about 90% of the functionality that browsers expect on other platforms.
Even in your list, most desktop users don't need an IDE or do photography work. Many don't need "games", and "games" itself is such a broad category of things, each of which presents new and exciting Wayland wrinkles and limitations to ram face-first into.
Hell, I can't run KDE on F39 without a constantly running XWayland recording bridge for desktop commonalities that use or require screen sharing (Zoom, Discord, etc.).
And most of the issues might start with the Wayland project, but they're exacerbated by Qt and GNOME problems, whether it's doing little to nothing and holding back every dependent app (Qt) or constantly coming up with new and exciting ways to break or deviate from the protocol (GNOME). Those bottlenecks aren't new, but they're magnified by Wayland's slow-moving chaos, and drawn into relief by X11 Just Working because the hacks and garbage workarounds are damn near 40 years old.