It's similar in that people are complaining without doing anything about it... and in a few year's time people will forget what they were even complaining about

It's similar in that people are complaining without doing anything about it... and in a few year's time people will forget what they were even complaining about. Nothing stops someone from developing something better. There are alternatives to Wayland and X.org. People just don't use them for whatever the reasons may be. Wayland is not new either - Wikipedia says the initial release was 2008. The distro maintainers and DE developers know a lot more about this stuff than random internet users that complain about any change... so much like the systemd fiasco, the professionals like it and the users complain for petty reasons. Oh no, your GUI app has some new bug, what will you do? Tell the developer to update their stuff... pretty simple. X.org was far from perfect when it was first widely adopted, and it's had 20+ years (well, ~40 years if you want to be pedantic) of patches and work-arounds applied while being "mainstream". Now, Wayland will enjoy the same treatment since all of the major distros are poised to adopt it. An awful lot of what was relevant when the X spec was being dreamt up (in the 80's) is completely different today. Even the maintainers of X.org openly talk about it largely being abandoned and full or issues that are un-fixable without major protocol and implementation changes. Which means... a v2 would be just as disruptive as moving to Wayland, but Wayland has decades of a head start. People enjoy complaining about change. It's pretty simple.