Look into river. It has the window management and keybindings able to be offered by other tools (I have an idea to implement one using XMonad's layouts).

It also vastly improved battery on my Dell Pro laptop. 58% battery used in 7h45m (light compilation day, but no suspend).

That sounds cool, but TBQH the last thing I want to do is make myself dependent on some obscure piece of tech I've only heard of once before (just now.) My plan is to keep running X as long as I can manage to make it run. If river finds traction and is well known to me in 10 years then I'll consider it then.

This is one of my big problems with Wayland; the fragmentation of Wayland imposes an unacceptable cost to picking the wrong DE, whereas with X all my tools for X still work regardless of my DE.