I personally find it better because, unlike regular tiling, you're not constrained to the screen size. I.e. if a 50% window width is too small, I can tile together several 67% or even 100% wide windows, and just scroll between them.
> since it reintroduces the mouse as a core aspect of window navigation
Not really, why? You switch between windows with binds, just like in a regular tiling WM. Mod+Left/Right (H/L) goes to the window to the left/right, etc.
I've been using paperwm for a couple of days and my laptop track-pad doesn't even support three finger scrolling so I'm currently using keyboard to navigate.