No matter how horrible X may be, it has a lot of value for end users. Almost all of this value is in the ecosystem around X.
You can't capture an ecosystem unless you provide that value, plus the activation energy needed to persuade people to change.
systemd (as an example of a large, recent, change to the "whole system") touched end-users far less than X so the pain was felt mainly by distributors and sysadmins.
Time and again, software that's "better" fails in the market because it doesn't provide the things that users need, want or use.
Backwards compatibility is usually key when trying to capture a large, long established user base. ...and that means backwards compatibility even (or especially!) with all the "bad" or "wrong" stuff. This is one of the things that makes software "products" much harder than software "engineering" (which in turn is "harder" than computer science).
Science is how it works. Engineering is getting it to work and productisation is getting people to adopt it.
Wayland has to solve problems that end-users actually care about rather than just being better in technical ways.
You can't capture an ecosystem unless you provide that value, plus the activation energy needed to persuade people to change.
systemd (as an example of a large, recent, change to the "whole system") touched end-users far less than X so the pain was felt mainly by distributors and sysadmins.
Time and again, software that's "better" fails in the market because it doesn't provide the things that users need, want or use.
Backwards compatibility is usually key when trying to capture a large, long established user base. ...and that means backwards compatibility even (or especially!) with all the "bad" or "wrong" stuff. This is one of the things that makes software "products" much harder than software "engineering" (which in turn is "harder" than computer science).
Science is how it works. Engineering is getting it to work and productisation is getting people to adopt it.
Wayland has to solve problems that end-users actually care about rather than just being better in technical ways.