This is the biggest problem. I accept Wayland brings benefits for some people, but I couldn't care less. Since I don't care about the benefits it brings, it needs to be entirely painless.
Until the switch is more painless than holding on to Xorg, there will be a good chunk of users with no incentive to make the move.
That depends a lot on how difficult it is to keep Xorg working with modern distros. You might get forced into Wayland when your favourite distro and all acceptable alternatives don’t want to put the work into integrating and patching an aging Xorg.
Whether it’s with a carrot or a stick, you’re going to Wayland sooner or later.
Thankfully I have few compelling reasons to upgrade for the sake of upgrading, so that will take a long time. Maybe by then Wayland will be a viable choice. At this stage I'm not convinced it won't be superseded by something else before then.
Put another way: I've seen similar new things come and disappear several times.
No, it means it has succeeded in attracting the X developers over, so the old stack starts bitrotting.
Remember, this was not some guys just randomly showing up and pushing their shiny new thing on people. Wayland was started by one of the developers who had already worked on the Xorg stack for several years.
Nobody is intentionally going to make X worse but everyone will make the kernel, graphics drivers, desktop environments, and other components better but potentially different in ways that no one will be updating X to match. X and it’s associated tech like DRI will bitrot. And of course existing bugs will go unaddressed.
That depends a lot on how difficult it is to keep Xorg working with modern distros. You might get forced into Wayland when your favourite distro and all acceptable alternatives don’t want to put the work into integrating and patching an aging Xorg.
Whether it’s with a carrot or a stick, you’re going to Wayland sooner or later.