Wayland was a mis-fire in terms of user friendliness for the first decade or so. But it is still a big step up from the mess that was a typical xserver back in 2010.
> It reduces features adds complexity...
The irony here is Wayland is part of a huge effort to decomplex an xserver into component parts. A really commendable initiative; the path forward while maintaining the X protocol probably was impractically hairy.
The Wayland protocol design had some glaring flaws, but saying that it adds complexity is unfair. It oversimplified; it would have benefited from some flexibility in providing a standard mechanism to let people inspect the buffers graphics buffers to be composited.
Wayland by itself is simplier -- it is done by "outsourcing" everything a window system should do to the window manager.
There is where the complexity kicks in.
The resulting wayland environments are more complex because wayland itself refuses to define/include features that desktop systems are expected to have. This results in a sprawling mess of competing and incompatible interfaces for those gaps that other parts of the implementations (desktop environments) now have to compensate for by including multiple implementations of the same thing based on all these different interfaces.
