The fact that there isn't really a single standard, and that one of them doesn't even support absolute positioning of windows or global shortcuts, definitely seems like a pain
Yup It doesn't even have a concept of absolute positioning, the only way to move a window is to specify a relative offset, and all coordinates are relative to the window.
And from what I'm seeing online, the developers of wayland don't want to have absolute positioning, instead they want to have higher level abstractions so the compositor can be more intelligent