After a week of forced use of i3 I went back to my usual de. Took less than 5 minutes to realize i3 is infinitely more efficient. So now I'm thinking nuke and pave with ubuntu server and then install x and i3... no traditional de at all.
@CrazyTux Try dwm sometime from suckless, seems to be even more minimal, and faster. Only downside is the lack of runtime configs, but people generally don't use those as much as they think they do.
Tiling WMs are one of the best things ever