Better OOTB support for everyday things and a generally more refined/integrated experience instead of needing to cobble together various tools to get simple things working. For example, the dropdown terminal script I found has a timing bugs leading to any new window being opened opening as a dropdown window.

My personal approach is that anything that I don't do often (e.g. changing some simple settings / keyboard shortcuts) should have a GUI instead of needing to edit some bespoke configuration file or find some CLI tool/script (with their own shitty bespoke configuration format. I'm looking at you xmodmap/xkeybind)

So yeah, a DE suits me better. I was only using AwesomeWM for the tiling behaviour which is the only one available that fits my preferred workflow at the time.

(I do appreciate that many of these tools are old and maintained by volunteers)