What are you confused by?

> Ultimately it appears to be software with more fans than productive users.

Correct. You can swing productive usage of Durden and the rest of the kit in its current state, but it's still an experimental piece of software under active research and development. As it stands, it's more attractive to daily drive xorg as a default while keeping arcan around to hack on and experiment with.

It's been rapidly closing the gap towards usability over the last few development cycles. I can speak for myself as tentatively waiting for 1.0 before abandoning xorg totally, which is at least a few years away.