I've been going through a similar experience over the last few years, mostly driven by my hardware getting older and not handling the requirements of modern DE'

I've been going through a similar experience over the last few years, mostly driven by my hardware getting older and not handling the requirements of modern DE's (when I'd prefer the resource to be used for applications). It's nice stripping back to the original structures, though it does feel like computer archaeology sometimes. There's a lot of services in the upper layers that have to be switched off to get back to plain .xinitrc and Xresources! On the upside, I know my configuration and it's all in a repository now!