My experience with Wayland has been very solid within the last year or so I've been on it exclusively but it's definitely implementation dependent. You're right you shouldn't have to know about these things and I certainly get the sense that's the goal. I mean one disadvantage of a system being developed in the open is that things aren't necessarily 'released' as such when 'ready'. They're in the open for people to adopt/or not, many times still rapidly evolving.

I value this approach but it's certainly not for everyone.

> It should be a tool, not a lifestyle or ideology.

That's...a very subjective statement? I think free software definitely has its place as an ideology if you will, if people want to live by it and are willing to put with the downsides why not? Some people are in it to preserve general purpose computing for the next generation let's say. I see that as completely valid since nobody forces you to use their output.

But given how expensive the Apple ecosystem is, I would certainly not expect things like having to know that poll() will not work correctly after an update[1], if it's indeed just a tool.

Plenty of regular people have to get at least somewhat familiar with the Windows Registry for example.

Point is, in this industry these sorts of things happen and so you do end up having to know about certain internal inner workings of the system you're working on one way or another. It's obviously more of a case on a system developed in the open but not exclusively.

1 - https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/10/11/poll-on-mac-10-12-is-...