Aye, I pretty much agree with that. I used the taskman program from windows 3.11 until it quit functioning, sometime around windows XP. Clean, simple, customizable groupings, haven’t found anything quite like it since.
These days, I don’t care about DE at all, so long as it handles global shortcuts and can run yet another quake (or some other quake-style terminal in a pinch). Also, some sort of movable windows is a significant bonus. Honestly, if I’m in X land, it’s often wm2, as you don’t get much simpler than that.