Curious what you mean by "maintaining these frankenstein configurations", and what you were trying to do. Was the WM under heavy development with user breaking changes or something?
I can't argue with your experience, but I've only touched my StumpWM config a handful of times in the last 10 years or so, usually to add a new defcommand or keyboard shortcut.
1. Laptop screen brightness 2. Wifi setup 3. Application launcher 4. External monitor/projector configurations for presentations
etc.
Some people might argue this part of the unix principle to have separate tools that do one job well but frankly I don't care about the unix principle as long-time emacs user (the anti-thesis of unix). The end result was a frankenstein thing: random tools glued together to emulate a basic desktop experience.
Every one of those things worked out of the box for me the last time I installed (which, admittedly, was via Manjaro, so a fair amount of config came from them). Even prior to that when I rolled an i3 setup by hand, external displays was the only troublesome bit.
In the end, I am running most of the normal services a GNOME desktop would be running, but without using the GNOME shell, and that has worked very well.
Shall install vim and be happy or shall we explore the entire environment of plugins and pick the 50 we like best after trying 150 then install Emacs then find our 50 favorite addons there.