It looks like the previous hyprland config language was already getting close to being Turing complete;

Already has variable substitution and math, it seems to falls short of Turing completeness only because I don't see any form of recursion. But recursion is something it could accidentally gain if someone decided to add templating to the language.

Besides, looks the config files can call out to external executables, which absolutely are Turing complete. And moving to lua might actually simplify configs by allowing more things to be done inside the config system, rather than calling out.

I did run Awesome for awhile and I liked it, but I never used the Lua config for the most trivial things so it never got in the way of anything.

I never found that Sway too annoying to just use the shell commands to grab/modify the current state of Sway (https://github.com/tombert/rs-swanbar) and just use a "real" programming language to actually do any kind of programming logic. To each their own!

That feels like a plugin or external program, not configuration

I have to agree. There are things that I want to do with my sway scratchpad that are just not possible because the config vocab is so limited. I might port my config to hyprland and give it a shot.