And you need to configure i3br/polybar, amongst lots of other things.
I ended up on Regolith mostly to see how someone else who’s used i3 for a while sets things up. I’ve found I like it pretty well. It’s a nice middle ground. I may sometime go back to building my desktop from the bottom up, but Regolith has been a good way to get a working i3 setup to build from.
It’s also a very fast way to have i3 setup and use for a week to see if you like it. If you do, then you can build what you like. But if you start from building first, your initial time investment will be much greater.
i consider myself a sort of power-casual linux user, i don't develop professionally but love to tinker and play around with it, almost exclusively for aesthetic reasons. regolith being built on ubuntu means that the second i find myself out of my element, there's always the familiar and ever-present terminal i can pull up, that responds to all the commands i already know, has the binaries and services i am already familiar with, etc.
that being said, i've taken some light dips into the wild, mainly using manjaro architect to play around with manjaro/i3 - regolith was a very awesome(lol) way to learn i3wm because i wasn't simultaneously having to also learn the ins-and-outs of a non-debian-based operating system