[Lain]

Never been a fan of KDE personally. It just feels bloated to me, but a lot of people swear by it, so I guess it's just preference. Englightenment just doens't really seem all the way... there, for lack of a better way to put it, but it's been about 10 years since I last tried it. It's probably a completely different product now.

Wayland is fine until your CPU gets busy. And then it starts lagging pretty severely in Gnome. That's a pretty severe oversight in my opinion. X may be a mess (or so they say), but it works like a charm, so I don't see any point in Wayland either. I'm with you, I'll use X if it's available.

Try installing everything from scratch (compositor, display server, window manager, etc) on a headless install and you'll see just how much garbage is between X and the rest of the display stuff lmfao.
I'm really not exaggerating when I say there's like 14 different frameworks just to render a window lmfao. 
And each DE/WM uses a different protocol to communicate with X, making it a nightmare if you like swapping between them like me desu.
X itself isn't terrible, but everything between X and your screen is, which is why there's such a huge push to get away from X in recent years.

I'll give Enlightenment a shot if I can get it installed and up+running quickly. But if I'm not satisfied in like 15min with it, it's back to XFCE lol