That is a shame. Given that Wayland should be a huge improvement over X this will lead to either: i3 withering and eventually ceasing to exist, or a fork of i3 that works with Wayland.

Also what is wrong with systemd (with regards Linux - the BSD's can handle their own init systems just fine on their own)? On my systems systemd has been wonderful.

...But wayland can't replace X. As I understand it, wayland is linux specific, and so saying X will die is saying that no other unix needs graphics.

As for what's wrong with systemd: Where to start! Journald is the root of all evil, it puts way to much stuff in to pid 1, the developers want dbus in the kernel (which is an awful, awful, awful idea), and the project is encouraging higher level software, that has to business being system dependent, link to a library that is linux-only by design. And that's only to tip of the iceburg. Its default's animostiy, its design is an atrocity, the implementation a catastrophe, the only question left to ask is: Where did they go RIGHT?

I'm tracking this i3/Wayland fork which seems to be pretty active too: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway

Likewise. I've been very impressed. The one place it seems to have trouble consistently is with X applications that want to have floating dialog windows. So many moving parts there, I'm hesitant to lay the blame on Sway.