I think NWC is the way forward. We just need to shift towards using lnurl in the RSS feeds instead of keysend. Until that happens, Alby is one of the few wallets that still supports keysend.

In defense of Wavlake, one of the reasons they don't support non-Wavlake albums is because their infrastructure is built more to support nostr, which is lnurl. Once most artists are using lnurl in their feeds, Wavlake will have a much easier time handling payments to those external artists.