Awesomewm is and always has been my favorite window manager. My biggest issue with it, i3 and other barebones WMs is that there are a lot of edge cases covered

Awesomewm is and always has been my favorite window manager. My biggest issue with it, i3 and other barebones WMs is that there are a lot of edge cases covered by traditional DEs that you suddenly have to solve yourself. And often they're things you first discover when you're trying to do a thing affected by that edge case and you waste a lot of time doing something other than what you actually wanted to do. So I've begrudgingly moved back to KDE. It's customizable and capable and is close enough to what I expect a DE to be without wasting my time too much.