Yeah, you learned the tiny bits and pieces of a desktop that you took for granted before. Like trays, notifications, locking, screen saver, etc. Just for the learning experience, any daily driving linux users should at least try to setup a fairly functional desktop environment using bare WMs as the base.
It does pretty much nothing in terms of fancy windowing and layout features. No tab interface, split screens, etc. I let those handled by my TWM and it just starts really fast.
Holy hell, a lot of what you just described hit right home with me.
I started off as one of the cheap developers ("technical consultant") for one of those Microsoft business products. Almost every single one of our customers are already ingrained into Microsoft ecosystems and setting up the system we customize and sell is mostly a matter of integrating into their existing AD, Exchange Mail Server and sometimes their private cloud. I was pretty ignorant of open source tools that would tremendously help even if you're mostly using Microsoft. Ignorant might not be the right word. It would be more correct to say "afraid to peek out of the comfortable Microsoft bubble". It wasn't just me, a lot of propriety consultants don't really bother with anything else. If something's beyond our capabilities we can always get the support of Microsoft, supposedly. This chain of responsibility give end customers assurance somehow. Like you said, assurance on who to blame and sue at least.
Took me a while to break out of Microsoft bubble and now I do open source ERP. I do get by okay, but I think it's mostly because my country cannot afford Microsoft license fees.
ERPNext does have ecommerce. All of it's modules are free. The whole thing's integrated with it's back-end accounting and inventory system. There may be some features you might not need because it's primary purpose is for back office usage.
There used to be a post socialist era mindset that people from my country used to have back in the 90s. It's simply that if you have to advertise for your product, it's probably bad. And overprized because you were spending money on ads. I remember the older generation specifically bought unadvertised products recommended by people they knew.
Another aspect to consider is the term " invention is the mother of necessity" coined by Jared Diamon, in contrast to " neccessity is the mother of invension". A lot of technology either get discarded or used for something that the technology wasn't originally intended. Hence the idea that inventions come first and the necessity for them follows later. Targetes technological innovation tenda to be very expensive and involves a lot of trial/error.
I believe this phenomenum doesn't just apply to big innovations and inventions. It also applies to day to day problem solving and in your case, choosing the right technology for your work. Without prior experience and established norm, a technology that might completely makes sense to you for a certain kind of work, might not pan out in actual use.
I just checked the name. It's nwg-shell.
Last time I tried was around 8-10 months ago, I think and it was still rough around the edges. Seems to have matured quite a bit.
I also wish for a complete desktop environment with workspace semantics of tiling wms. Someone's actually building one out of sway, I remember. Don't remember the name though.
I've used it before as a backup X WM alternative to my main sway.
I switched over to xfce after a whiel thougj.