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I tested UNIX domain socket latency on my machine and I get an average around 250 microseconds to send a 1 KB message between two processes. Granted, there's no overhead for an abstraction layer like libxtrans, but shuffling around bits entirely in userspace is probably pretty fast compared to sending data through the kernel.

Network latency is not the problem. I don't know why people keep harping on it.

As for the rest of your incomprehensible rant, the best I can say is that you are uninformed, or you are overgeneralizing. The drivers do not have to follow any specific architecture (except in the interface between the driver and X) because that is dependent on the hardware and the people who developed the driver. So you will find a range of quality. Then again, based on the crappiness of many Windows drivers, I'm not convinced that they are really that much better.

The rest of the X code base is actually pretty decent. The X server is decently well-designed, albeit not perfect (no software is, except for what they use at NASA). It has proper layering from the abstract portions in the DIX down to the generalized framebuffer and machine-independent code, down further to the OS and HW specific parts. Extensions live in their own directories for the most part and don't interfere more than need be with the core stuff.

Convenient bad-driver: I'm sorry you don't like this response, but fact of the matter is, it generally is the problem. Hardware is flaky and really hard to deal with, especially when you have no docs or limited docs. In my experience, and in watching the mailing lists and to a lesser degree, bugzilla, most bugs and problems are related to the drivers. You just need to accept that and move on.

I don't know what lagged I/O you are talking about. X drawing is pretty fast in many cases, where it is properly hardware accelerated. I don't notice any input lag. If applications are laggy, blame that on the app/toolkit, or, again, bad drivers that don't accelerated commonly used operations (RENDER is a repeat offender here). On my machine, most 2d ops are properly accelerated, so I get great 2d performance, even with a compositing manager running. It's almost on par with XP, and that's saying something given the crappitude of GTK+ (Qt3 feels, however, about as good as GDI, if not better). I have noticed that some distros, Ubuntu especially, are particularly poor performers on my machine. I will continue to use Gentoo as long as that's the case.