I recently tried some tiling window managers, but the problem with those was that none of them provided basic default configuration and you have to configure them from scratch. For example you have to add a plugin for small things such as a battery indicator. The custom themes were too much bloated for me. I ended up installing shellshape for gnome. Do you know any tiling window manager which solves this?
I'm fairly certain that i3 comes with a percentage battery indicator by default. The default config is pretty good (except it uses `jkl;` instead of `hjkl`, but that's a simple fix).
For some reasons i3 was showing wrong value for battery. It also had issues with the graphic drivers, showing black screen on logging in. So I didn't consider it as a viable option for me.
I think that's part of a different package, i3-status or something, which is not strictly required but recommended in docs etc. Possibly it's also installed by default if you just choose 'i3', depending on your package manager.
You're right, turns out Arch's i3 package is a group of packagse: i3-wm, i3-status, and i3lock (screen locker).
I was also surprised by the lack of battery indiciator in awesome-wm. But it took <10 lines of Lua to add. It was a pain at first but now I really like how extensible awesome-wm is.
This might not work for you, but the way I get battery indicator is to incorporate it into my tmux console. I always run a tmux on the first workspace, and can go there for time and battery. Each device is different, but here's battery code that works on my T460s (http://songseed.org/exhibit/20160629/thinkpad.battery.script)
A benefit of this is that it doesn't matter what window manager you use.