However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.
You don't need to run a full DE to have tray icons. I'm running i3 and the network manager applet + other tray items work just fine.
I use xmonad with stalonetray [1] (which as you may guess from the name is a standalone notification tray) and dzen2 [2] as a notification area for basic information ( battery / cpu / temperature / wifi status ). With them I cover enough of my needs and I don't feel the need to anything more complex.
I think that it would be nice to have some middle ground between a full desktop environment and bare-bone and manually configured window manager though.
[1] http://stalonetray.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://github.com/robm/dzen
If they did a simple non tiling WM that had those little things in it and wasn't a piece of crap, I'd be there like a shot.
It's Openbox (which is a really capable, lightweight non-tiling window manager) plus a panel plus Xfce Power Manager and similar applications to handle the desktop environment stuff.