I would honestly pay money for a proper, relatively simple, DE written around i3. I like tiling because it makes me productive and helps me organize my desktop, not because it gives me a hard on to not be able to use my volume button or to have firefox look incredibly ugly.

Seems like those people tend to use the OS as their DE and eschew integrated IDEs. One pane for tests, one for grep/ask, one for vim/emacs, shell, etc...

I do this with XFCE and it works really well. You just have to prevent xfce-panel and xfwm from starting up and autostart i3 instead. Replacing i3 with xfwm on the fly also works like a charm, I can toggle between tiling and floating WM's using keyboard shortcuts.

When I try to use xfce components they interfere a lot with keyboard shortcuts. I'm not sure why, but most of the gtk-compatible DEs bundle keyboard shortcut stuff with the settings-daemon, which is really the piece I miss most. It just leaves things feeling more broken to me, but maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I generally add custom application shortcuts to XFCE's keyboard preferences instead of i3's config and change i3's $mod to the Alt key. Haven't had any problems of conflicting shortcuts.

I much prefer having window management stuff on super since I use a lot of terminal apps where alt is important. Can't overload too much there or things get funky. And I have a lot of custom window management keycombos for i3 because the basic set are a bit bare.

I'd actually like to go the other way, a Gnome-less setup. Have seen some interesting setups with Awesome WM to that affect.

Bit too lazy/would like to keep coding and not spend weeks replacing the good in Gnome with whatever the alternatives are.