"I prefer to have lots of windows open, and being able to position them how I want with the size I want greatly increases my productivity." That's just way too

"I prefer to have lots of windows open, and being able to position them how I want with the size I want greatly increases my productivity." That's just way too fiddly and time-consuming for me. 99% of the time I want my windows maximized and stacked behind each other. i3 does this for me automatically, and requires absolutely no interaction from me to have them set up the way I want. If I was using a floating window manager for that, I'd have to manually maximize them and manually stack them. If I want windows to be positioned in some custom layout that I use one time and never again, there is no difference between i3 and floating window managers, because i3 lets me do exactly that in the same way as floating window managers do, as I can float any window in i3 and position and resize it normally. However, if I want to repeat a particular window layout then I can configure i3 to automatically put windows in that layout. I used to do this with GIMP a long time ago, before it had single-window mode. Now I just use it as a single maximized window, and don't bother with that. I make popup windows float, so those will appear centered and disappear without changing my window layout, as one would expect of popup windows. Occasionally I'll manually float a window, when I want the kind of control you're talking about, or when I want it to overlap my default maximized window for some reason, but that's pretty rare.