I ended up switching to Debian, which is more or less removing all the Ubuntu-ness from Ubuntu. The only major issue I've found is that Debian's installer is pretty crude compared to Ubuntu's and requires a lot of hand holding. For me, as a 50+ year old nerd, that's not an issue, but it makes it harder to recommend to others in an age where people don't use open, non-spyware, social media networks "because they have to pick a server". (Trump didn't win because people didn't have the ability to know what he is, Trump won because the entire world is objectively stupider than it was 20 years ago. The entire world, not any specific generation, before anyone gets offended.)
I see everyone plugging XFCE so I'll put in a quick mention for Mint desktop, which is basically what GNOME was before it went to crap. I have no idea what Mint's long term plans are for Wayland but thus far I've heard nothing suggesting they're desperate to switch to it - there's a project to support it, but last I heard it's still experimental. If they do switch rather than co-support, hopefully it'll be forked as it does seem to have the kind of community that would have a high proportion of X11 users. The problem for us is probably going to be the various "big" self-contained projects like LibreOffice or even Java, and the risks they'll drop X11 support too.
I cannot believe that SystemD, which was actually needed as Sys V Init was awful, is the one attracting the controversy, despite it slotting into any existing distribution and requiring no additional support, but Wayland gets boosted, and not just boosted, but boosted usually by Slashdot's old farts. Maybe there's a way to persuade Poettering to lead the Wayland project, as I suspect 99% of it is a personality conflict thing.