The reasons why we chose the current path were explained in detail in the blog posts.
Touchpad gestures was the most popular feature to implement. In order to do that we needed a good reason why all the other project maintainers would want to spend time discussing a feature with us. Wayland is the future, yes, but currently a lot of users are still on X which makes our argument much less convincing. Now we can say that touchpad gestures will soon be available everywhere and get their attention this way.
I agree that X is legacy platform. Unfortunately it may still be used for quite some time. Core functionality such as screenshots and input record/replay is not universally available on Wayland. So X will still be used for significant amount of time.
Please tell me what else I could explain to increase the transparency of the project and I'll try my best to do so. Thanks!