That sounds like me, although I eventually found my way to tiling window managers (xmonad for a while, now stumpwm as it's written in my favorite language)
Fluxbox was easy to configure with multiple monitors and customize in general. Just tried xmonad with xmonad --replace, and crashed X. Which has been my only experience with xmonad honestly.
Edit: I do like gtile and some other gnome extensions.
I run xmonad at the moment. The learning curve is huge if you don't know Haskell. It took me ages to get it set up and working. But after I learned Haskell, it's really very nice.
Will need to work on getting these features through xmonad, or something else. gtile itself seems to be js.