Wayland was initially X12 but it is divergence from X protocol requires a new name. Xwayland is made to maintain compatibility of X11 applications so that part is already taken care.
Wayland libraries are intentionally kept to minimum to avoid repeating the same mistakes from X11, an outdated protocol unsuitable to the modern desktops environment in an evolving world. Practically no developers want to actively maintain a pile of mess given the fact X11 suffered of fundamental design flaws like non-existent security in mind.
Wayland protocol is already in use for decades from mobile to appliances. Traditional desktop took a while because of technical debts. Getting rid of X11 tremendously helps Linux ecosystem to properly adapt in an environment with constant changes.

X11 is very complicated, and full of tons of cruft no one uses anymore. For example, originally all the widgets in a window were drawn by the server. Fonts were drawn by the server. At the time was a great idea, and worked well over low-bandwidth connections. But now we want things like anti-aliased fonts, 3d graphics. All that server stuff is still in X.org, but no one uses it anymore. Instead we use all sorts of layers of extensions to the protocol. X11 was impressive for its time. And it’s amazing how well it has been extended to work. But now there are only a handful of people who understand any of the X.org code and the X11 protocol itself. It was these very people that said, there has to be a better way, so they started Wayland. I highly recommend watching Daniel Stone’s linux.conf.au talk about his work on X.org and X11, and all the intractable problems that we have with it now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

I am not arguing Wayland is the way, nor am I defending Wayland developers. But those that hate on Wayland aren’t the ones who’ve actually worked on X.org code and understand the X11 protocol.

Yeah but that doesn’t really answer the question. Why did it get stuck at X11? X11 could and should have just coexisted with X12. Then X12 could remove all the features that nobody uses anymore like raster fonts, printer server and other cruft. These things would continue to exist in X11 and so compatebility would be maintained. Atleast in the early 2000’s a new protocol would have solved a lot of issues.

Everything was redesigned on purpose and for very good reasons. Everything had to be taken in a different direction due to the fact many things could never be fixed or changed with x11 with regard to how it does things without just dropping the majority of its code which would mean it was no longer the same thing and would have taken even more years of work then just gradually switching to wayland. I have not used x11 in years and neither has the corporation I work for and I would not even think about x11 if this website did not write articles about it since I have absolutely no reason to use it anymore.

Facts. They had to do it. Even the moribund Xorg still performs better than Wayland, and uses much less battery. It will be interesting to see how increased developer interest moves XLibre even further ahead.

Ask the people from Red Hat and Freedesktop. They were proud of “killing” Xorg.