Nobody is a "bad guy," even if we may disagree emphatically with their design decisions. Ultimately, however, we may feel we aren't entitled to those providing free labor to do so in such a fashion that their work product meets our specific needs or aligns with our expectations.
That said, having a bare-bones protocol that fails to include standard features, forcing each implementation to meet users' needs differently, is somewhat disappointing. Anything that reduces functionality for the sake of ease of maintainability is going to be unpopular with end users who have everything to lose and nothing much to gain directly.
The core is bare-bones, there are numerous standard protocols since, and many other are in standardization. Here is a site to review their state: https://wayland.app/protocols/
Don't you think it more reasonable that features that will definitely be implemented by every desktop environment ought to be core rather than not fully standardizing on it 14 years later?
Attentive designers would have standardized this in the incredibly obvious way of allowing the user to white list specific apps, logically at install time and screenshot apps would then implement a singular standard that works in version 0.1. Instead we force users to confront and understand the difference between x11 xwayland and wayland in order to figure out why their screenshot app doesn't work or doesn't work well.
This doesn't enhance the case for "regular" people to use Linux.
You can’t push through a new protocol that’s already huge. Wayland was deliberately made extensible, programs can properly query about its capabilities, it is actually quite great design.
It’s just the negatives of the bazaar style development, it’s not like we ever had a unified approach to desktops (remember a few years ago how tray icons and whatnot were all different between KDE and Gnome?). There is no entity like apple that can just work on the details in the background and release it overnight and say that from now on this is the supported API. An open source one has to live in the open from day 1. Mind you, the standardization will speed up considerably, the first year of that 14 is very different in pace from the last ones.
Also, screenshots are not a trivial task to get right, sure, here is its buffer is easy. But then will you also implement a screen sharing API separately? Will it just repeatedly take screenshots for like 20 FPS? That was the reason for it taking longer time, but it works very well now.
> remember a few years ago how tray icons and whatnot were all different between KDE and Gnome?
Yes, and then tray icons worked across desktop environments for a few years until Gnome decided that this standard should be thrown out and replaced it with nothing.
I think what many people annoys with Gnome and Wayland is that they control the overall trend in Linux desktops and yet couldn't care less about most advanced and experienced Linux users. But what other Linux desktops are there?
That said, having a bare-bones protocol that fails to include standard features, forcing each implementation to meet users' needs differently, is somewhat disappointing. Anything that reduces functionality for the sake of ease of maintainability is going to be unpopular with end users who have everything to lose and nothing much to gain directly.