For what it's worth, Exceed was never fine in my experience, and you were better off with the Cygwin server. At one time, the first thing to ask about certain sorts of Emacs problems that were reported was "Are you running Exceed?", with high probability the answer would be "Yes". I never understood why "we" paid for it. But, yes, X did always run on relatively low-resource machines. (I can't comment on how Wayland compares.)