They weren't "developers" more like a Jr intern asked to do some minor maintenance

The real work was done in the 80s/90s through a consortium of universities and corporations

Then one day, some nobody shows up and in their infinite wisdom decides: I know better than all the 100s of people before me.

And now we have to listen on and on about how this nobody was somehow a "major developer"

The work done in the 80s and 90s was for very different hardware than now, when accelerated graphics wasn't the norm. MS made that mandatory with Aero and then Windows 8 a long time ago, Apple's been at it for even longer.

Wayland exists because, thanks to hardware innovations, there's a better way to do the job than what was possible in the 80s.

  >> Wayland exists because, thanks to hardware innovations, there's a better way to do the job than what was possible in the 80s.

Unfortunately Wayland is not a better way.

I think we would have a lot less problems if wayland was called X12 /s

We'd have had a lot fewer problems if Wayland had been X12, in the sense of taking an approach of gradual iteration, even if they went at it fairly aggressively.

E.g. instead of the Xwayland approach, you could've already ditched "half" of Xorg if you stripped most of the server-side drawing primitives and server-side font support and moved them to Xlib, handling it client side, and then made it clear someone else would need to take over maintenance of Xlib, and "started over" with a stripped down Xcb.

You could've validated further restrictions by letting clients opt in to them with extensions before "flipping the switch" and restricting them by default when the damage was acceptable.

Even if we then eventually reached a point where there'd be a schism, odds are it'd be far smaller. And certainly far less time would've been wasted.

There was a schism anyway (wayland vs mir). I was excited about both, though I never understood the difference between the two.