Personally I find I get increased productivity out of not constantly fiddling with window placement.
On the other hand, there are things, that really aren't going to work just out of the box and are hard to configure. Xmonad has quite a different behaviour than Gnome, and sometimes different from what usual desktop app expect. It might be necessary to create a specific settings for a single application, sometimes. But that's what makes it beneficial. If it were just another bad copy of metacity or kwin-like window manager, without adequate support of EWMH and stuff like it, which is the case of many and many X11 WMs, then it would be really worthless.
Sure, you can do that. But then you also have to take the time to understand THAT config (which, isn't even optimized for _YOU_, to begin with) and get USED to that . . .
>I agree that at first it seems like it's going to be a huge hassle to setup but it's really not that bad after you've done it once. You also have to invest time in understanding how the config goes, and have a bit of experience with Haskell, and Xmonad itself, to even create a config that really is good for you.
Maybe twm is something for me, maybe it isn't. I really don't know - because I only gave it one try, and quickly gave up (because I was having some problems with it, and wasn't willing at that time to set aside time to resolve those problems).
Also, stop calling tiling window managers "twm". "twm" is a specific window manager that comes with X. (Now there's a hard-to-use window manager.)
Finally, what problems were you having? If you just didn't like it, say so.
Currently my xmonad.hs looks like this:
import XMonad
import XMonad.Config.Gnome
main = xmonad gnomeConfig
{ modMask = mod4Mask
}
Sometimes HN makes me sad.