Frog Protocols announced to try and speed up Wayland protocol development

I think "speed up Wayland development" isn't quite right, tho it will probably feel that way to end user. It's about getting experimental protocols into the hands of users in a formalized manner while the stable protocol is still being forged. This already exists in certain forms e.g. HDR support being added before the protocol is finalized, but having a more formalized system is probably pretty helpful for interoperability, e.g. apps having to work with different DE's.

My biggest is concern is whether there's a possibility this will actually slow down Wayland development by pulling attention away from the stable Wayland protocols in favor of Frog Protocols. But hopefully the quicker real world usage of the new protocols will bring more benefits than the potential downside.

That's the beauty of standards, there are so many to choose from.

I doubt this will have much of an effect. Compositors already implement protocols that aren’t in upstream yet.

All this really is is putting some of those protocols in a GitHub repo and giving them a nice name. Gamescope will naturally implement them because frog works on gamescope. KDE might implement a few. Gnome and wlroots probably won’t implement them because (1) Gnome prefers a more lean set of protocols and likely won’t adopt a protocol until it’s “finished” and (2) Simon Ser, the wlroots main maintainer, is very involved with upstream protocols and would rather see development happen there.

Gaming development iterates and moves a lot faster than general desktop integration development, so this makes sense. Honestly the slowness is just because all the projects involved need more people and bandwidth at the QA and approval levels. There's a YON of activity in the projects downstream, but everything is backed up in reviews. I'm kind of glad a Valve adjacent project is pushing this, otherwise there would be a lot of fragmentation to do this in various other ways. The downside of course is getting developers in certain studios to actually work through this instead of just going for Windows support.