I'm always kind of amazed at this kind of desktop setups, and I guess they're not suitable for lots of people for the simple reason that most users have a "consumer" relationship with computers and not a "producer" one. My biggest question here for people with this kind of text setup would be: don't you surf the web? Do you use then lynx or another text web browser? What about services and platforms that are designed…
I used to use i3, and I used Firefox for browsing.
I used the keyboard to layout the windows where it was more convenient, but I clicked on buttons with a mouse when that was more convenient.
I now use the standard Ubuntu setup, not for any particular reason, just because it's the default. I often miss being able to conveniently layout terminal windows with just a few keystrokes. Trying to keep terminal windows neatly tiled with a non-tiling window manager is so annoying that I don't even bother.