You got it pretty right.
Valve actually wanted to avoid the entire X11 vs Wayland fiasco - and yes, those very Protocol Extensions I mentioned as lacking were the reason Valve needed to address the missing protocols.
What was missing: Integer scaling, Low-latency frame delivery, Arbitrary resolutions, fullscreen behavior.
So gamescope is a shim that is Display Protocol agnostic.
Some games require Win32 graphics stack which does not work on Wayland.
Direct Wayland support in games is currently still very limited.
Some of this is due to Nvidia. However... if a balky independent developer can halt your implementation - it means that your implementation is too codependent and not properly adaptable:
Some benchmarking (Also highlighting the problem of non-gnome compositors):
Sadly, a lot of these say that even using XWayland is sub-optimal, compared to X11.
None of this says Wayland can never be ready.
Instead, it advises slowing our roll.
We cannot say Wayland is ready now - much less claim it is superior.
I must admit, I didn't realize you had such humor tucked away. Gave me a chuckle. I did not say that!
I've said what needs saying and won't repeat myself like Uncle's cassette player stuck on a Free Bird loop. All I'm saying is Wayland is on a strong upward trajectory to replace X11 by 2030 as the primary display server protocol for Linux distros. All the qualms and incomplete features are bugs not design flaws, and ongoing development will resolve them. Major distributions are already transitioning, and the data backs Wayland's momentum.
Fedora 41 (2024) has moved to a Wayland only approach, removing X11 sessions entirely for GNOME. Fedora KDE also defaults to Wayland.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (2025) completely dropped Xorg and moved to be Wayland only.
openSUSE Tumbleweed (rolling release, as of 2025) defaults to Wayland for both GNOME and KDE Plasma sessions, with X11 sessions available but no longer prioritized.
Arch Linux (rolling release, as of 2025) defaults to Wayland for GNOME and KDE Plasma installations, with X11 sessions available as an option for compatibility.
Debian 13 Trixie (expected late 2025) defaults to Wayland for GNOME sessions and plans to phase out Xorg as the default display server.
I think you can add in-game HDR to that, at least between what I saw on Archwiki and that my Steam Deck remains my only device that plays games in HDR, despite an HDR capable monitor and two HDR capable computers. (My attempts at getting Gamescope to cooperate in Bottles went poorly; I continue to hope they make it a checkbox in Steam instead of having users edit command lines.)
I tell you one good thing that came out of the debate, ive learned more about differences between X11 and Wayland. I had no idea how complex they were. It just shows how much code devs have to manipulate, in order to make things compatible.
Sadly X11 is being killed off by Red Hat and all the bug fix requests made by the guy who was forking xorg have been deleted. Again it is Red Hat screwing the GNU/Linux community over again just like they did with systemd and pulse audio. Historically X11 was needed so that terminals could connect to the server. There was no graphical display with early computers. I posted an excellent video by DJ Ware who covered both X11 and Wayland extensively.
