Pipewire is compatible with the Pulseaudio protocol, so Pulseaudio clients work on Pipewire. In contrast, Wayland is a protocol. A Wayland-compatible composit

Pipewire is compatible with the Pulseaudio protocol, so Pulseaudio clients work on Pipewire. In contrast, Wayland is a protocol. A Wayland-compatible compositor that also speaks something else would still be a Wayland compositor. I think the fact that Wayland isn’t a program is a big part of the problem. The dominant Wayland compositor in use is gnome-shell, and it’s obviously extremely GNOME centric. With X11, the interaction between clients and gnome-shell was intermediated by Xorg, so, if gnome-shell wanted to support Xorg (which it did), it had to support relevant features of Xorg. Xorg supported server side decorations, so gnome-shell did too. But gnome-shell as a Wayland compositor supports whatever set of features it likes, and clients that require additional features don’t work on GNOME, so they largely don’t get written, so there is little pressure on gnome-shell to support them. A Wayland competitor won’t help here. An alternate Wayland server that sits in front of gnome-shell might, but it would be a mess. Ultimately the best solution would be to break GNOME’s mindshare dominance. If enough users demanded something better/different, then IT departments and sales would notice, and GNOME would need to either catch up or get left behind.