I, and many others still use xterm (among other things), so you're making a false claim to support your point. That's called lying. Stop doing it.
I meant developers no longer use it. If you know of a project started in the last 5 years that decided to use these features of X, and not use GTK or Qt or some other toolkit (which themselves don't use these features), I would like to hear about it because I genuinely don't know of any.
You will still be able to run xterm under a Wayland compositor, don't worry about that.
Um yeah? And input device handling.
Input is a bit of a sticky wicket, but that's not exactly an insurmountable problem. Why should input devices be tied in with the display server (and in X's case, font rendering, vector graphics, ...)? I honestly feel like they're better off in a completely separate system that can be re-used elsewhere without bringing in all of X. Isn't that the unix philosophy?
It worked on a Sun 3/60. There is no way it could be bloated by modern standards.
See this cousin comment. All this old stuff it needs to support makes the X project huge and lumbering. Dead code stifles innovation because it scares off developers.
Those can't both be true. And the X11 API isn't really that complicated. It's quite simple if you understand it.
Yes, that is often the case with things you understand. I have tried and failed many times to understand X, I really have. I understood what the Wayland protocol does in about a day. As for the first part, code length is not the same as understandability, or even simplicity. You can have 1 kilobyte of brainfuck and 2 kilobytes of python, and the python is still simpler. Wayland provides bitmaps to compositors, and delivers input events from compositors to windows, and at no point do you need to probe some server for COMPOSITE support, or manage the child X window's global coordinates to correspond to where you're drawing them on screen, or muck around with who gets control of the root window. You get bitmaps, you draw them. You get input events, you distribute them however you please. It's really straightforward.