Just refactor SerenityOS, take its DE and make it a Wayland compositor, stop reinventing the wheel. Ladybird realized this, why can't SerenityOS do the same?
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Funnily enough SerenityOS's WindowServer is actually more usable than Wayland, so that would be a downgrade.
I have shortly considered trying to port the Serenity GUI to Wayland, though, because I really like the visual style. I don't have the C++ knowledge to effectively navigate the project, though, so I let go of that idea pretty quickly.
SerenityOS has no business running on Linux, but a fork could be pretty neat for 90s GUI lovers. IMO the Serenity UI easily beats those heavily reskinned KDE installs every time.
Take a look at labwc, the look and feel is similar to Openbox and can be made to look retro-like.
Xfce will also come with Wayland support in the next version or so I hear.
I don't get the Sway comment about being barebones, it's a tiling compositor, it does what it should do.