If you want a full-fledged modern DE with active development, the choice is only between GNOME and KDE imo.
>GTK or Qt
I used to worry about whether to go full GTK or Qt, these days I don't really care. Both work in either environment and the theming is usually consistent as well unless you have a custom theme, so they don't even look out of place.
>X11 or Wayland
It seems like Wayland is going to be the future, so it's only really a matter of whether it works well enough for your uses yet or not. If it does, great, use Wayland, if not, stick with X11 for a bit longer.
It honestly doesn't seem like that much of a mess to me.
If you want a full-fledged modern DE with active development, the choice is only between GNOME and KDE imo.
>GTK or Qt
I used to worry about whether to go full GTK or Qt, these days I don't really care. Both work in either environment and the theming is usually consistent as well unless you have a custom theme, so they don't even look out of place.
>X11 or Wayland
It seems like Wayland is going to be the future, so it's only really a matter of whether it works well enough for your uses yet or not. If it does, great, use Wayland, if not, stick with X11 for a bit longer.
It honestly doesn't seem like that much of a mess to me.