"If I understand the OP correctly, this sort of philosophy is deeply troubling to some people. For simplicity-oriented folks, trivial things should be trivial,

"If I understand the OP correctly, this sort of philosophy is deeply troubling to some people. For simplicity-oriented folks, trivial things should be trivial, as a matter of principle." I suspect those people don't matter to this conversation and would not be working on things related to Linux graphics at all. Once you start involving DRM and Mesa (or the proprietary nvidia drivers...), everything gets really complicated, and it's not easy to come up with a one-size-fits-all approach. In particular: the lack of GBM/dmabuf support prevented having any kind of consistent API for efficient screen capture when using the nvidia drivers, but I think that is changing slowly.