> often they were scientific users, running huge mathematical monsters on beefy remote systems
I'm amused that xpra has become the feasibility proof for wayland remoting, and here your argument for X is the entire reason xpra exists in the first place -- the X protocol is so unbearably sucky at this exact use case. (Home DSL -> university compute cluster = nasty latency, university wifi is flaky and compute jobs are long, screen/tmux are insufficient because you need visualizations, and PhDs have to be procrastinated on *somehow*...)