increasingly it's not that I need or desire any more features, but shit simply doesnt work if I dont bootstrap my window manager with a service layer desktop environment. My xinitrc includes sillyness to get KDE, gnome, dbus, systray icons to all work juuust right.

If you use KDE+i3 as the WM, none of those problems exist.

So its more like, other apps expect certain things to work in a certain way so make sure you get all the ducks lined up and then youll be good to go