I think the lack of development of Wayland is more due to its corporate sponsors. Nvidia has been really slow to embrace it which hindered adoption. RedHat is putting a lot of effort in but desktop is not their main game so it doesn't have priority. And Ubuntu has been trying to play the "Not Invented Here" game for a long time and trying to get their own intellectual property on the map which didn't really have any discerning feature from Wayland other than being their own. But it did fragment the attention it received.
But this is mainly a corporate game, not one played by independent developers. Remember, also X11 itself was a corporate invention. It came from DEC, MIT and IBM. I don't think it's fair to blame the users for its lack of progress.
But I still think choice is good. I don't want to be forced to use Gnome, I don't agree with their UI ideas (in particular the opinionated software paradigm). Having multiple desktop options is a great thing to have, and it lead to new ideas like tiling WMs such as i3. Personally I use KDE.
I don't think "Linux on the Desktop" should ever be a mainstream thing anyway. It would suffer from the drawbacks of the other options, such as too much corporate control. For something like Wayland it doesn't matter as it's just in the background doing its thing. But for a desktop environment it matters a lot. If Linux had only one option it would be just one of the other not-ideal options around. Just like ChromeOS has become, for that matter.
Also, it's not really realistic to expect all Linux users to 'get with the program' and use the biggest option available to strengthen Linux as a whole. Most of them use it because they want something different. Not because they want to promote Linux.
But this is mainly a corporate game, not one played by independent developers. Remember, also X11 itself was a corporate invention. It came from DEC, MIT and IBM. I don't think it's fair to blame the users for its lack of progress.
But I still think choice is good. I don't want to be forced to use Gnome, I don't agree with their UI ideas (in particular the opinionated software paradigm). Having multiple desktop options is a great thing to have, and it lead to new ideas like tiling WMs such as i3. Personally I use KDE.
I don't think "Linux on the Desktop" should ever be a mainstream thing anyway. It would suffer from the drawbacks of the other options, such as too much corporate control. For something like Wayland it doesn't matter as it's just in the background doing its thing. But for a desktop environment it matters a lot. If Linux had only one option it would be just one of the other not-ideal options around. Just like ChromeOS has become, for that matter.
Also, it's not really realistic to expect all Linux users to 'get with the program' and use the biggest option available to strengthen Linux as a whole. Most of them use it because they want something different. Not because they want to promote Linux.