I agree that the deliberate design simplicity of vanilla Wayland is to its detriment, as does anyone who has ever interacted with Wayland. That said, there are extensions to the protocol which have been ratified by XDG and are supported by most compositors and applications that remedy most of those issues.
Isn't that also more or less the case with X11? From what I understand, if you try to use bare Xorg without any extensions like Xfixes and Xdamage, it's pretty miserable
Well yeah. Wayland is a protocol, not an application. There's nothing it can do except delegate to one of the two ends of the connection.
These things are specifically not defined by the protocol. They could be. They're not, by design.
I agree that the deliberate design simplicity of vanilla Wayland is to its detriment, as does anyone who has ever interacted with Wayland. That said, there are extensions to the protocol which have been ratified by XDG and are supported by most compositors and applications that remedy most of those issues.
Isn't that also more or less the case with X11? From what I understand, if you try to use bare Xorg without any extensions like Xfixes and Xdamage, it's pretty miserable