been a long time i3 user mostly for the sane defaults. It requires significantly less fiddling than any other window manager I've tried out.
Have you figured out how to make i3 move the mouse pointer to the area of the newly-focused window when you change window focus by keyboard? AwesomeWM does that out of the box. i3 doesn't and it's very annoying, because then when my table makes a microscopic movement and causes the mouse to move, suddenly what I'm typing is diverted to another window and weird things happen.
focus_follows_mouse no
It doesn't do what you wanted, but I also can't see why anyone would want a window to focus simply because you hovered over it.