After unreasonably forcing myself to battle sway window manager, wanting something minimal and space efficient and I'm bloated feetch wise, I impulsively installed fvwm, spent ~ 90 minutes trial and error and managed to configure it for 90% of what I want. And it uses about the same resources as sway.
Sway and wofi etc are virtually undocumented. What a battle to get it to do something dumb like run a script in ~/Bin.
At least and hour spent getting xterm don't size to be readable, default is 8 pt! Lol. Now 14. Screen dependent I guess.
What a relief from creeping featuritis.