So I'm a long time awesomewm user (5+ years) and when I started shopping around for a wm I tried both awesome and i3 (and another I don't recall the name). Awesome was easier to get started with and all the Lua code is easy to understand and use.

However, could someone who used both elaborate on the differences? Would I gain anything from trying to migrate to i3 instead?

At my point of view, only the community size is the difference, but that hasn't bothered me too much as awesome for most part just simply works.