Your suggestions basically boil down to:

1. Use ratpoison, just because it forces you not to use the mouse.  The only problem: I absolutely *despise* its emacs-style keybindings, and it's usually the applications themselves that force you to break the flow and reach for the mouse--not the window manager.  I tried ratpoison, but I just couldn't use it.  But if anyone out there likes emacs, don't let this opinion bring you down!  Emacs users are just the types of people who would love this window manager; I just happen to be more of a vi fan.

2. Use text-mode tools when possible.  A good idea sometimes, but in my experience not always possible or practical.  mc might be a possibility, and possibly cmus if I could get it to work.  Not sure about the others though.  The problem is, in many cases there is a superior GUI application to do the job, and some of them even allow mouse-free operation.  Audacious, for example, seems to all basic control with the keyboard.  And with the Alt key, you can typically access an application's menus without touching a keyboard.

3. Use what effectively seems to be a renamed Vimperator for Firefox.  Good idea, except... I gave up frustrated with Vimperator because it screwed up the existing Firefox keyboard shortcuts I knew and it was to difficult to figure out how to use.  It just wasn't worth it when it seemed that its one major feature (in my opinion) was its ability to number all the links on a page for easy keyboard access.

But yes... kill the mouse to kill the pain... I do agree with the general theme of your topic.

You can use almost any tiling window manager as a "stacking" window manager with varying levels of success.  By that last part, I mean that some of them go out of their way to provide comfortable "floating" modes, while others don't see stacking as a priority as they are intended to be used as tilers; for example, i3's floating mode does not feature snapping windows to each other or the screen edges, while many dedicated stackers might.  In "floating" mode, the window managers behave in the same way as a stacking window manager.  You can move, re-size and "hide" windows by stacking others on top of them in the same exact way.  This is generally seen as a bad thing in the tiling window manager world though, and I agree, because it breaks the paradigm.  But it *can* occasionally come in handy.

I don't really understand what you mean by this, but you can pick your modifier using i3's first-run wizard (choices are Alt and Win).  The script will also look at your keyboard layout and generate a configuration file with a slightly modified set of keybindings if necessary.  I think it would be best to point you to i3's own keymap information/documentation page:

https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html

Right up at the top of the page, assuming QWERTY of course, is the complete default set of keybindings.  I use the word "default" loosely though, because when I first set it up my account was set to use the Dvorak layout, and the movement keys were automatically modified to be HTNS.  If you use Colemak and it is set as the keyboard layout when you run i3's wizard, the same would likely be true for the NEIO keys.

Edit: As for ratpoison itself providing a stacking mode, I'm probably not the person to ask, although based on its intention to completely eliminate the mouse at all costs I would assume that it does not offer such functionality.  A quick Google search returned results hinting that ratpoison does not have a floating layer.

I just mean that I got into vi to avoid using Ctrl or Alt.  I'm guessing this advantage does not extend to i3, however.

I guess I'm looking for a hybrid; it wouldn't be a true tiling because of the overlap, but aside from that, the rest of the paradigm could carry over.

Correct me if I'm misreading, but it sounds like you're saying "floating mode" is just like the typical WM's, which would indeed defeat the purpose.  I intend to set an overlap when starting certain programs then use it indefinitely as a tiler.

How do you avoid overtyping?  That is, I usually type one or two letters more than it actually needs to popup a new page, which usually leads to some weird side effects in the current page since those extra letters get interpreted as commands.

I got used to it. When I see it react I stop typing.

In my quest to try out various window managers, I actually gave ratpoison a try, but didn't get very far.  The "C-t" keybindings really killed it.  openSUSE doesn't seem to have a package in its repositories, but my Debian virtual machine is still available for testing.  I would be willing to try it out, but where do I start?

The man page says that ratpoison will use ~/.ratpoisonrc, and if that file is not available it will use the system default configuration in /etc/ratpoisonrc.  Well, that's not available either, so I can't just copy that over and use as a template to modify to my own preferences.  No doubt one of the first things I will want to change is the C-t to some more sane escape key modifier, because for me the window manager is practically unusable by default.

ArchiWiki has a wonderfull set of examples and tips to get you up and running in no time.

Pentadactyl is a beauty. Everything is just thought out to perfection. It's so good, its hard to believe it is an addon. It works with history, other addons, settings, downloads and is full of brilliant features. For example you can click the "next" and "prevoius" buttons on any page, just by double taping the [ and ] keys.

Mplayer is something I forgot to recommend. It would also make lalop happy because it won't waste any space when playing a video :D.

Oh and btw, Ratpoison's multiscreen support is brilliant.

I really don't want to post any configs because I believe that you will develop  your own best setup by yourself. 1 up for being brave. If you can't figure out something, feel free to mail me :).

For me it's a bit like GUI vs command line: When I use something I don't know well it's nice to have menus and clickable stuff to get a good overview. It's also okay for all those programs I use rarely.

When I use a functionality often, I try to learn to do it by keyboard only/mostly. My Extend mappings help there.

I actually don't have a problem with programs that *do* make use of the pointer.  Sometimes the mouse works well, in fact.  The problem IMO is over-reliance, which I was almost completely oblivious to until I switched to a tiling window manager myself.  This is made worse by programs that do not have good keybindings and, in other words, actually *require* the use of the mouse just to function properly.  IMO a well-designed GUI application should be mouse-aware, but also be comfortably and completely controlled by the keyboard if needed.  This, I think, is where so many GUI applications fail miserably.  Well, other than often being bloated, but that's beside the point.

Two words: ASCII art.  But seriously, there are exceptions to everything; bitmap/vector editors are one class of applications, and trust me, I thought of them when I typed my previous post.  Hell, you could use an Etch-a-Sketch if you wanted.  In the interest of keeping the post shorter and avoiding unnecessary blabbering and confusion, I purposely left it out, because these random corner cases you might occasionally run across were *not* my point.  I'm talking about regular, day-to-day use, and unless your job or hobby is graphics editing, that's most likely not the case.

Sure, you might want a pointing device for a bitmap editor, but image editing is something I do rarely.  I am not artistic at all, so about all I ever do with the GIMP for the most part is minor modifications (cropping, resizing, etc.).  If I wanted I could have mentioned image editing in my original post which you replied to, but I honestly figured it would be pointless because surely everyone knows there are corner cases to just about everything.  And my idea is *not* to get rid of the mouse 100% as I thought for sure I already made clear; it is to reduce my dependence on it.  If I can carry a laptop around everywhere I go and never need to pull out a mouse unless I want to do some serious image editing or some other occasional, random activity, then I have succeeded--and that is the point.

Out of the two input devices, the pointer and the keyboard, to me the keyboard is more wretched.  But yes, I wish OS makers would try and cater for both (and more).  For a while I managed to pretty much operate my old Apple Powerbook which had a broken keyboard with the pointer alone.  It's amazing how far you can get with it.  When I connected an external keyboard to the machine, it made ] getting to the trackpad difficult, which meant I then had to control everything with the keyboard alone.  It was possible and that was with an old OS version: OSX Tiger.  I tried the same with Ubuntu a few releases back and it just wasn't possible to use the default distro with just the keyboard.  Win8 is almost there with keyboard support (you do have to tab around the houses).  Today I had Google+ open in a tab in my browser and that wretched site steals away CTRL and Page Up/Down for tab switching - how evil is that?  It's those horrible little gotcha/inconsistencies that can make you miserable (like when Flash steals away the keyboard focus).