I appreciated the novelty as well, fast forward many years later and I'm doing a bunch of Googling figuring out how to disable the fancy animations on the work issued osx laptop.
It's funny how common this story is in this thread; my first Linux system was Ubuntu + compiz and I loved every little effect; now that I'm old(er) and boring, I'm running a stripped-down Debian on i3wm. It's pretty amazing that I've managed to run such vastly different systems over the course a decade with only incremental changes and have it fit me like a glove the entire time.
Compiz was always about cool looking bling, it was never really meant to be functional, just something you could burn unused C/GPU cycles on and were usually only in a few places.
When animation became more ubiquitous (in app) it got toned down a lot and when those sorts of animations are turned off you notice the speed increase and that your brain can do the visual diff just fine.
There are still plenty of visual bling you can add to i3wm without sacrificing the "instantaneous" of it though.
During my Linux zealot years (started with Slackware 2.0 back in the day), I used to experiment and play with any window manager I could put my hands on.
Nowadays I just use the default configuration of whatever OS I am on, just with some minimal configuration changes like icon size or mouse double click behavior.
I don't think the level of customization has changed too much for me, but the objective of my customization has. In college having it be cool looking mattered a lot more to me, and now having it be fast and have an efficient and highly customized interface is.