I couldn’t find the specific reasoning for this change, but I feel like QEMU is probably just too holistic to be appropriate for this kind of project.

QEMU needs to be able to emulate all the ARM hardware with enough fidelity to boot a naive operating system. For the purposes of running userspace applications almost all of that is not required, you really just need to convert one ABI to the other and translate the instructions. No need to handle firmware, the MMU, interrupts, disks etc.

Yes! It used to be so hit or miss with Wine, but I played WoW in it around the same time and it was crazy that it worked (at least most of the time).

There’s just no reason to do this work. Even if you ignore the fork’s controversial maintainer, and just favor the fact that it’s maintained at all (which is what the proposal’s author is suggesting) just… Why?

X11 is basically over at this point, why throw a last minute wrench into the existing, working Xorg infrastructure?

When we dropped XFree86 back in the day there were license issues, packaging issues and a real alternative didn’t exist - all justifying the effort to switch. None of these are a problem today.