They're a half realized idea though. The value of tiling WMs is that they allow you to compose what is essentially your own workflow dashboard and save it. What needs to happen is to complete the idea: entirely composable GUI interfaces.

Xmonad allows you to launch programs in a configuration of your choice. Hell even tmux does.

The only way to be productive... for a developer. The great majority of computer users have little to no need to tile anything, to be productive.

I'd argue that the desire to have windows side-by-side when multitasking is far more common than to have them be particularly overlapping and hiding one another. Certainly a lot of what I do on a computer is development, but tiling makes composing emails, image editting, writing, and web browsing less painful too. Floating windows seem to be prioritizing a metaphor over usability.

>Floating windows seem to be prioritizing a metaphor over usability.

That's why Microsoft set the "always on top TWM/FVWM IconBar", that's it, the taskbar.

The widespread shortcut/gesture for making a window full height and half-screen width was a good middle ground for me.

Tiling WMs (which I tried 10 years ago?) would always break on some programs (say Gimp), then you had to run that program in "floating mode" and its already too much overhead for me...

Nah, CWM is better. Floating, not decorated env with a menu switcher and tags everywhere. Just open a FEW windows per tag, learn to context switch LESS, that's it, keep a kiss approach ;).