Comment by occamrazor

I should have explained myself better. The old way of specifying a position (pixel coords in a plane) does not work well for complicated setups. Among the possible alternatives there is:

1. Assign responsibility to the wm (Wayland’s way)

2. Create a new way to specify position preference in a complicated world. That’s what you propose, IIUC. It’s possible but complicated, and Wayland had a lot of other problems to worry about, therefore I understand why they didn’t choose this way.

3.Leave the simple protocol in place, but let the wm override the application’s choice when necessary. I guess a lot of apps would not work properly in such a system.