Compiz has tons of options but not all of them work yet there is only nearly everything that FVWM2 and Sawfish had. The transition to Metacity was a bit grumpy since it certainly didn't allow for all the things that Sawfish did, but eventually it was tolerable as I could configure the essentials right and it was much better integrated with Gnome than Sawfish.
Compiz, however, seems to be more concerned about cool effects than real adjustability and coherent configuration! I use the keyboard for most things, rarely the mouse, and thus I have a number of keyboard shortcuts to launch programs, do window operations, flip around virtual desktops etc. That means I need to carefully configure the keys to work with me, as well as take care of unbinding anything that I might need in an application. So here's an example.
I expect to be able to configure those in the Keyboard Shortcuts window but Compiz apparently pays not much attention to what's set up there. I then googled and tried the ``ccsm`` utility but using the Commands plugin to bind actions into keys didn't work either. For some reason, in Unity/Compiz the <Super>t brings up the fucking trashcan can no matter what I do while I think the same keyboard combination is just perfect for my terminal. I don't want to use Ctrl-Alt-t instead because control and alt are valid application modifiers, and it especially in Emacs translated to transpose-sexps. The super key is great for any of these meta or desktop-level bindings.
So here we are: the program insists on something and thinks it should win. It was after I realized Unity is based on Compiz that I had ditched Compiz before, pretty much for the same reasons. Enabling the desktop effects in earlier Ubuntus was tempting but I never got my keyboard bindings and desktop behaviour quite right wrt that.
A non-compiz Unity would probably be a killer: I like the dock and the Super key menu where you can just type the name of an application and find it in real-time.