Well I guess I will have to transition to another DE in the future. I'm curious which DEs people are using with Debian.
When I was on Debian I was pretty satisfied with Openbox + XFCE panel (and I guess buy in piecemeal other XFCE bits as need) wishing came from the Crunchbang days. It was pretty lightweight and low-maintenance.
With Wayland finally taking off (color management be damned sad), maybe you could give Sway, the Rust tiling manager, a go. Debian has a page for it https://wiki.debian.org/sway
Sway isn't written in Rust, all C as far as I know. It's really great though! Highly recommend it if you're looking for a minimalistic and very practical window manager.
Oh, I'm sorry. I've totally wrong for a while then. Yes, written in C, 97.5% C.