I like i3 for the simple fact that I can mix floating and tiling. If I'm gonna be, say, using a terminal and a web browser at the same time, I don't want to sacrifice half my screen for the terminal. No, I'll just keep my term floating, and position it over the whitespace on the webpage I'm reading, and keep my browser fullscreen.

But when I wanna work on 3 files simultaneously in vim, push them to my github periodically, and monitor an IRC channel at the same time, tiling becomes valuable.