That sounds like me, although I eventually found my way to tiling window managers (xmonad for a while, now stumpwm as it's written in my favorite language)
Once I had compiz working, it's been gnome exclusively.
Fluxbox was easy to configure with multiple monitors and customize in general. Just tried xmonad with xmonad --replace, and crashed X. Which has been my only experience with xmonad honestly.
Edit: I do like gtile and some other gnome extensions.
I should say that I actually like quite a bit about GNOME. I'm even a fan of mutter and GNOME shell (especially with gtile). I just wish I could decouple it from the rest of GNOME.
I run xmonad at the moment. The learning curve is huge if you don't know Haskell. It took me ages to get it set up and working. But after I learned Haskell, it's really very nice.
Fluxbox was easy to configure with multiple monitors and customize in general. Just tried xmonad with xmonad --replace, and crashed X. Which has been my only experience with xmonad honestly.
Edit: I do like gtile and some other gnome extensions.