It's going to be a tough battle if they want to win my heart away from i3.

Fear not, friend. There's a very active port of i3 to wayland: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway

I haven't personally tried it, but I have heard about it a few times, so I assume it's fairly good. This is the list of supported features, if you are interested: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/issues/2

The problem for me is that i3 is only a part of the puzzle. I use sxhkd for a bunch of hotkeys; that has to be replaced. I use xdotool _a lot_, and I don't know if such functionality is even possible in wayland. I use scoot heavily, both as a way to screenshot from a hotkey (presumably easy to replace?) and as part of scripts; my script which locks the computer uses scrot, imagemagick and i3lock. There's probably a bunch of other small things in my system which will break by not having an X server too.

You sound like someone who'd like keynav http://www.semicomplete.com/projects/keynav

Shameless plug: I maintain a fork at https://github.com/yjftsjthsd-g/keynav because the original author hasn't been active in a while.

Edit: wrong link :)