I've been considering switching to i3 for similar reasons (plus configuring xmonad in Haskell is a bit of a pain as I'm not great at it). The only thing that is keeping me from doing it is the fact that i3 seems to bind workspaces to screens - I often find myself wanting to bring a particular workspace up on my central monitor.

Any i3 users want to pipe up and enlighten me on how I could go about configuring i3 so that I can switch to any workspace on a particular screen?