They are becoming more essential by the day.
Exactly, they are becoming essential now. They are still not essential and definitely were not essential 14 years ago. That's all I'm saying. Expecting that everyone will invest a lot of effort to support a project that does not deliver any value to vast majority of users is silly. 14 years later the need is slowly growing so the support is materializing. That should be the approach from the beginning: build something people need.
'Giving them platform'? What is that supposed to mean? It's not like they gaining anything from my CPU cycles. No one knows what software I'm running on my computer.
I'm not depending on any software as long as there are alternatives. And no, the point is not to disagree with large companies. Big corporations make contributions to Linux kernel all the time. As long as it's truly FOSS and they don't control it it's not an issue. If the company controls it it's not really FOSS (like Chrome or Android).
Also, not using their code is not the same as telling everyone else they should not use it. You can use whatever you like. Complaining online that some community was not nice to you is IMHO silly.
Again, not essential to vast majority of Linux users.
Where I live police monitors those things. They will even check pawn shop inventory for jewellery reported as stolen and you have to show an ID to pawn anything. You would have to sell it to some random guys on the street which would be risky.
None of those features are essential for average user. None of them are even 'nice to haves' for like 90% of users.
I don't think stealing would be the hard part. Selling the goods would be. To steal large sum I guess I will drive a stolen car through a jewellery store's window. I believe this had fairly high success rate with Romanian gangs doing this many times in France and getting away with it. To steel a car I would look for someone leaving it running while and getting out to for a moment. I think I would be able to find one in a couple of weeks. Than smash the widow, grab what I can and run. Risky but if I'm dying anyway it would be worth trying. Turning it into cash would be very difficult though.
Best Polish SF movie is a comedy from the 80s abut two guys who are hibernated and wake up in a world without men. It was filmed during communism and it's full of hidden jabs at the system. It's actually a good SF movie.
So? What features essential for average Linux user are missing in X11? If the code is so bad I'm sure users struggle to use it. Do they?
So what that those are the same devs? If X is bad code it would mean we should probably look for other devs to do it, right?
Normally projects like this address real needs. If X would actually fail to provide crucial functionality on modern desktop someone would develop alternative that would cover it and people would switch in a matter or years. Instead Wayland set out to build something complex and useless for most people and now is surprised it takes a lot of time for it to gain traction.
How it should be approached is that if people need some very specific setup (like multiple displays with fractional scaling and different refresh rates and they want to play games on it and need to get 100% of their configuration) Wayland should provide them a tool to do just that with dedicated server and DE. Most people wouldn't need any of this and would stay with X, few people would use the new DE. If more and more people would require the functionality provided by the new DE it would grow, get forked and other DE would start supporting the standard. The approach of "we build something 1% of users need, spend a lot of effort to support us" is what's silly.
They are 'real' in the sense that they exists. They are not 'real' in the sense they are not alive. The birds can all be drones and still have laws.
But there are also all the other skiers going down fast that can hit you. I tried snowboarding once and just when I was getting the hang of it I fell on some ice and broke my thumb. Nothing life threatening but it required a surgery and I couldn't do any sports for about 6 months so it was super irritating. After that I decided it's too much risk even on green slopes and just gave up.
If Guitar hero set worked for you than for example this:
https://www.thomann.de/es/millenium_md_90_mobile_drum.htm
should also be fine, right? It even has two pedals. Would that be a reasonable starting point what would later let me move to full drums?