I can only speak for myself, but I'm a big fan of Openbox when it's set up properly. Before I discovered Crunchbang, I would burn many hours getting Openbox to the way I liked it, installing certain packages and tweaking settings until I was exhausted from the effort. But in the end, I had a setup that got out of my way and let me focus on work.
When I discovered Crunchbang, I was blown away. about 90% of what I set up for myself was already done here, with a slightly different theme and a few different default apps of course. But I found that with just an hour or so of tweaking I could get Crunchbang to the same state I would spend a weekend trying to get to on another distro. The differences between Crunchbang defaults and my own were usually improvements, and I decided to switch to better apps after giving them a go in Crunchbang (from Gedit to Geany for editing for example).