Have you tried other tiling window managers ? i3 [0] comes to mind, but XMonad [1] and Awesome WM [2] are 2 other popular choices in this domain. There are plenty of others to pick from, too [3].
[0] http://i3wm.org/
Yes, microsoft windows. I use version 8.1 and while most end users loathe the interface I've studied the "windows" key and "context menu" key and found it quite fast to perform all my daily operations (except web browsing) mouse-free.
My experience with linux is that some programs are great but too many dont follow standard on very common keyboard operations such as search, tab navigation, context menu. Also it seems many of these desktop windows managers such as ratpoison come with default key mappings that conflict with many of my application's default key mappings which forces me to re-configure.
I invested some time customizing key mappings that would alleviate the issues, but I have a large stack of actual programming work I need to get to, and after awhile I just felt like I was trying too hard at it and decided to go back to the system that works for me. I would like to learn a little more about developer's mouse-free success with linux, vim, browsers and ides such as intellij. 2 years back when i researched this it didnt seem like a very important issue to many people, but to me the little bits of speed gained from keyboard shortcuts add up into great savings in time and cuts in repetitive movement and I consider it to be a crucial part of any development system.
Also I don't get how the Windows 8.1 window management comes even close to the 2 programs you mentioned (Ratpoison and Awesome WM). With both of those (or any other tiling manager) you can do much more than just maximize and snap a window to the sides. (you have virtual workspaces, automatic tiling, better switching, etc)
The thing that is the most visible to me is virtual workspaces. It allows you to create fixed layouts of programs (editor on the left, terminal to test on the up-right corner and tail -f of the relevant log on the down-right corner) grouped within a user-defined context ("code on project1", "code on project2", "mail", "browser").
The idea is to switch from activity to activity, rather than from application to application. It's extremely important, because when you start piling up activities, you accumulate applications, and you don't want to switch through all of them within your activity.
It's nice though that MS made this a default for Windows, while Linux still wants to ignore that MS ever managed to get those keys added to the keyboard. I've been using them for years, one as wm-key and the other as compose key to be able to write special characters (ë, ø, €, etc.) easily on a default qwerty keyboard. That still leaves one spare key on most keyboards
which was his blog, and there are not archive.org copies from 2009 and before. He had a lot of very thought provoking and iconoclastic things to say about OSS and the OSS movement that I found very interesting.
If you want to try out lots of different window managers, the LinuxBBQ distro Cream [0] has 76 different window managers installed.
Alternate link for WM reviews: 30 Window Managers in 30 days: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=18273