Boy who cried wolf in reverse?

> everyone else has stopped trusting the constant stream of "everything works fine" the Wayland community has produced for the last ten years or so despite all evidence to the contrary long before most things actually started working well.

It's sad that some vendors have spread baseless hype. I did a switch like 1 to 1,5 years ago on my laptop. Had one (pretty critical) issue with Zoom screen sharing and Pipewire. On my HTPC, did a switch only after Nvidia started to support Wayland, which was also during the last year or so. On my main desktop I have a bit more complex setup to I still need patches for Gnome, but Wayland basically works 24/7. It even fixes few issues such as standby modes for monitors and DE's screen lock. I know there are lots of use cases that are not covered yet, but it works for normal stuff.

> Since the transition is also generally more work for those with non-standard configurations
Those are a small minority. I don't disagree, this is a problem, but not a major one.

> unusual window managers
Well obviously if your WM does not support Wayland, there's nothing to test yet.

> fiendishly complex compositors that are essentially an entire X11 server worth of complexity thrown on top of what window managers did. Sure, there is a workaround with wl-roots but that still doesn't seem to make compositors nearly as abundant as window manager choices were on X11.

True, but you're using it wrong. I've never understood the distro / WM hopping. Most users are happy with a single WM/DE. Besides DEs like Gnome/KDE already implement so many things that duplicating some compositor code is no biggie. For smaller WMs the solution is to build upon wl-roots. Many of the WMs are crap anyway and not intented for large audience. The WM is heavier, but the other stuff is lighter.

> Essentially the Wayland community has a marketing problem

Sure, but again many of the problems will be fixed as time goes by. Xorg doesn't have any decent PR department either. Heck, it doesn't even seem to have any developers anymore outside conspiracy theorists :D I've used Linux exclusively on desktop for 25 years now. There were lots of issues during those years. Fully functional OpenGL/DRI support (e.g. Intel was lagging behind for years and amd/nvidia drivers were blobs), support for two GPUs from different vendors, video playback and hw acceleration, font rendering, gtk/qt toolkit looks on non-native DEs, audio servers (esd, arts etc.).

In some years Wayland be in the same state as Xorg.