That said, everything you said about the Xorg server could be said about wlroots. Nobody has to “implement Wayland because they must” anymore. The X approach is available in Wayland as you can build your window manager on top of wlroots and many do.
Seems fairly apples to apples to me.
Or you can choose a competing compositor library as there are now quite a few available. I think XFCE is looking at using Wayfire. Or you can control more of the stack directly and write your own as GNOME and KDE are doing.
Not only do you not have to implement Wayland to make a window manager, because compositor libraries are available, but people are writing Wayland compositors even though they do not have to. Louvre is a compositor recently released that seems expressly designed to make writing new window managers super easy.
As for innovation, there seems to be lots in Wayland. Valve just added HDR. GTK is looking at using dmabuf. There are already Wayland window managers that are not ports from X. There seems to be innovation at every level.