@thomasadam @peppe Thanks for that! I totally forgot about the decorations topic, which is of course very relevant, it means even jumping through the hoop and implementing a #wayland compositor, you can only deliver part of the functionality (and almost none of the looks) of your window manager.
But even with that issue solved, I would really dislike wayland's design. Although I *do* think that most of #X11 core drawing is obsolete and useless (mostly for the missing alpha channel), I think a display server should offer drawing facilities. Replace X with something dropping lots of cruft (indexed palettes, COMPOUND_TEXT, etc), instead incorporate extensions that everyone needs these days, extend #XRender (now as part of core) to offer more drawing primitives, etc ... you could have a replacement for X11 that's worth dealing with. And window managers could still be separate clients.