[flukus]

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.