I find it funny that it seems like any conversation about a particular tiling window manager will eventually turn into a conversations about window managers in general.
So to continue the trend, I used to use tiling wm's until I learned about Emacs. Emacs lets me do away with tiling mostly because it itself supports it in a way, namely C-x 2 and C-x 3. I can run all my shells and gdb's right inside Emacs. Nowadays I usually either have one fullscreened Emacs window, Firefox, 1 external terminal, and maybe LibreOffice open on my laptop. I don't mess around with moving them around and resizing them. For me, it's enough to simply have workspaces to manage all of them (I use C-M-[np] to switch back and forth through them, Caps Lock is remapped to Control).
It's true though that the benefits of tiling window managers isn't just the tiling itself, but often that they're programmable and configurable through plain text files. There's also the benefit of lower resource consumption if you run it bare.
As for what I actually use? Xfwm4 gets the job done.
I'll second using Emacs as the primary graphical shell. It shouldn't really be surprising that it's good for that task, since the interface is (or so it seems to me) heavily influenced by Genera's X interface. If Emacs let you display an external program such as Firefox in a buffer, I'd as well do away with Openbox and just run Emacs.
(I use it rather rarely, because I have a small screen and generally have no more than 3 windows open at the same time; I jump between Emacs' "workspaces" with help of Elscreen)
OTOH I use urxvt with tmux for most command line stuff because it works better with zsh completions and colors and such. So I have three WM-level windows open (on separate virtual desktops, each maximized): urxvt, chrome and emacs with urxvt and emacs being further split into windows organized in a tiling manner. Works great for me :)
To add a little consensus, this is almost my exact setup too, though I'm on OS X and use Chrome for browsing.
As well as using C-x 2 and C-x 3, I've started using perspective.el (https://github.com/nex3/perspective-el), which means I can switch between different projects each with their own buffer set and window configuration, as well as switch to an IRC perspective. It's such a well-executed extension, definitely recommend it if you've never tried it.
I do this too, with workspaces on OS X and Windows (using VirtuaWin on Windows). Was always on a tiling wm on Linux before I switched to OS X (and now using Windows too a bunch), don't really miss them that much any more after starting to use emacs + evil.
Sounds like my exact setup, except I use Conkeror as a browser (it's an Emacs-like UI on Firefox's engine). I also use Xmonad as my (tiling) window manager, even though I usually cycle through fullscreen windows on various desktops, as you say.
So to continue the trend, I used to use tiling wm's until I learned about Emacs. Emacs lets me do away with tiling mostly because it itself supports it in a way, namely C-x 2 and C-x 3. I can run all my shells and gdb's right inside Emacs. Nowadays I usually either have one fullscreened Emacs window, Firefox, 1 external terminal, and maybe LibreOffice open on my laptop. I don't mess around with moving them around and resizing them. For me, it's enough to simply have workspaces to manage all of them (I use C-M-[np] to switch back and forth through them, Caps Lock is remapped to Control).
It's true though that the benefits of tiling window managers isn't just the tiling itself, but often that they're programmable and configurable through plain text files. There's also the benefit of lower resource consumption if you run it bare.
As for what I actually use? Xfwm4 gets the job done.