I'm using bspwm on my personal machine and Xfce on my work machine. There's some bug with bspwm and my work's EliteBook docking station that I haven't figured out how to solve yet - something to do with how the internal screen and VGA output are layout...

It's surprisingly complete and stable compared to how light it is. The EliteBook w/ an Intel 520 can't run Gnome without major slowdowns. It has some visually rougher edges compared to Gnome or KDE but it's perfectly doable to make it very presentable, and doesn't take as much resources as both of them - although KDE is not remotely as heavy as Gnome.

I really don't understand how Gnome became this monster of a thing it is today.

I use it in VMs quite a bit, exactly because it is light on resources.