Counter-review: the level of control is unmatched, but it's a little too extreme, I feel. Even something as simple as a volume widget isn't included OoB. Yes, there are libraries of widgets out there, but not many -- and not always the best quality (memory leaks are unfortunately common, seems to be a screwy lua/GTK interaction).

More importantly: the core framework just outright omits many of the core features that I've come to expect in tiling WMs. There's no support for i3-style window stacks, for example; I've tried several community solutions, but they're all trapped on a too-high abstraction layer and inevitably end up fighting with the WM in ways that you simply never need to deal with in first-class implementations.

All in all, I'm planning on returning to i3wm. For me, it's a bigger struggle to try building up a usable environment from scratch than it is to start with a solid foundation and then replace the undesirable components (i3bar => polybar, bindsym => sxhkd). AwesomeWM is very fun to work with thanks to the great APIs and documentation, but I can only wholeheartedly recommend it if you need absolute and total power over the UI, since that's AwesomeWMs whole schtick.