It's funny, I never really understood why people want to subdivide a terminal emulator. I want to see more lines of code, not read code through a mail slot. My visual layout has always been many tall and skinny terminals and editors. With dual 4K monitors, I've let the windows get wider. I find myself hobbled to be on a single laptop screen, so I usually defer real work until I am back at my desk.

I do use screen for the detach/reattach feature sometimes. But, ever since I started regularly using X Windows instead of a vt220, I use my window manager to multiplex. I will open multiple xterms and emacs X windows ("frames" in emacs terminology). I will never sub-divide one xterm or one emacs frame, and I only learned the command to undo an accidental windowing subdivide, much like I learned to abort from vi/vim if I accidentally get dropped into one due to a missing VISUAL environment variable.

If I can launch emacs through ssh with X forwarding, I will. If not, I'll open multiple xterms and multiple ssh sessions and run many emacs instances in -nw mode. Once in a while, I'll mount the remote files via sshfs and use my local workflow. Even locally, I am just as likely to have multiple emacs instances open as multiple frames from one instance, since I prefer to find files and open them from the shell prompt than screw around with file-opening dialogs in the editor.

Even back in the vt220 days, I was much more likely to use shell job commands to background and foreground for multiplexing rather than want to subdivide the already small console.