After thinking about WMs for a while, I ended up realising that basically what I want is Eclipse ( http://shimmie.shishnet.org/v2/post/view/3171 ) -- specifically, a tiled WM with arbitrary nesting of "vertical split", "horizontal split" and "tabbed" containers, and mouse support for re-arranging the windows. i3 comes so very, very close; but no mouse support :( (I know keyboards are better for most things, but they aren't better for all things; I'd like to be able to use both as appropriate)
Come to think of it, tmux uses that model too, with quite a lot of popularity, so it's not like it's a completely unknown style...
Anyone know of any X WMs that do it though? Bonus points for having independent desktops for each monitor, and also for keeping up with modern standards (compositing, that dbus-based systray protocol that I forget the name of, etc)