I have a terribly uninformed question. Ive been using i3wm ever since I learned it exists. Ive always had old machines and used to run Lubuntu, and at some point moved to i3wm. Its super fast and light which is what I care about the most.

I dont feel like Im missing anything, but then again a lot of people dont know theyre missing things which they cant imagine (before cars if youd ask people what they wanted, they wouldve said faster horses, etc etc).

So: What am I missing by using i3wm instead of for example Gnome or KDE? I dont care about pretty and shiny and animations. What else? Surely the whole holabalooba cant all be about pretty drawings and animations...?

(Sure, I probably would be able to find out by myself by trying these things but... since my starting point is the belief that Im not missing something, why would I be looking at these things...?

I used i3 for a few years before switching to KDE 1 or 2 years ago. For me choosing a full Desktop Environment over just-a-window-manager is about getting all the basics already co-installed with it: a default file explorer, default calculator, default terminal other than xterm, especially a default network-manager GUI, a sys-tray already populated with volume / screen / power / bluetooth / mounted-devices / clipboard / clock & date, a launcher, a system-wide config GUI ... without a DE, every single one of these is a manual install (plus researching the best choices and verifying & comparing their quality live) and/or numerous configuration files in diverse places, googling their syntax / incantations ... since all this stuff is "side-show stuff" (ie not my code editor, browser, email client, office suite), I nowadays appreciate batteries-included when setting up a new machine, reducing overall time-to-code-editing. But the endless custom-tweaking back then was good fun back in its own right. =)

KDE and gnome have nice point and click interfaces that are pretty natural.

If you feel at home in a terminal then you aren't missing much. However, if you want a nice GUI to configure your bluetooth headphones or network without having to know the various bluez commands then kde is nice to use.

I appreciate in KDE that it's an up to date traditional desktop environment. I learned computers with Windows 3.1, and that paradigm is still what feels the best to me, and KDE gives it in a nice looking, modern way, with a good bunch of quality of life features.

I think if you're curious, try it. Gnome as well, it's quite different. And if you're not, that's also perfectly okay, you are not missing anything crucial I think.

With KDE you get a lot more than just a window manager. And i3/sway have a very specific usecase and target audience.

By the way I've heard some people combine i3 with KDE, using i3 instead of KWin (which is its window manager component)