Well, after mrt-prodz kept annoying me with herbstluftwm, I had to try it... and it is ok, if you have it setup right.
I think, it is probably the same issue I had with wmii, it wasn't setup in a way I"got" so it just made me angry.

I tried gnome3 with antiX core. It made one ugly desktop.
It's was not worth the time spent.

(in case the 2011 OP is still looking for replies)

I use only stacking WMs. icewm and other stackers can perform sufficient snapping/aligning on the rare occasions I desire a super-compact layout.
Throughout the past few years, I've grown fond of using fluxbox as a WM, and SLiM as login manager.
All the desktop components.. I prefer to choose 'em piecemeal rather than adopting a full DE.

edit:
In another thread, we discussed ways to reduce iso size & I pointed out that nixing a certain few icewm themes would shave a few megabytes.
Here, I'm not advocating removal of any of the various window managers that are currently pre-installed to antix.
Their files occupy VERY little disk space & IMO it's great to provide users an opportunity to check out the various alternatives.

OTOH, if the earlier intent (in gauging who uses which WMs) was toward omitting unpopular WMs from future antix versions because it's a PITA for the antix developers to maintain
custom"auto updating menu" scripts, etc for each of 'em... their decision to thin the pre-installed WMs would seem reasonable.

I like iceWM and it runs pretty light compared to most. JWM runs even lighter, but it doesn't look as good. That might be a configuration problem. I have tried the Openbox type setup on other distros and don't like the lack of a start button. If you right click an empty spot on the taskbar, you get the menu, but if you right click a running program it seems to close or kill it.

One theme I like in IceWM is metal2 because it has decent looks and a"rollup" feature. I would agree that f you needed to trim things to load to fit, reducing the number of themes would be easy and unlikely to cause trouble.

I think the biggest keys to the window manager/menu system types is that they should be ones people both can and want to use, and there needs to be someone capable and willing to test and maintain them through the release cycles. I actually think the idea of having the options of window manager and filer system at the login is pretty nice from a user perspective if it isn't causing the developers a lot of grief. I 'm guessing that now that those are there, it doesn't pose a big problem to migrate to the next release, but adding new window managers to that list could easily get a lot more involved.

I'm assuming someone is tracking what's getting used and what isn't there that's getting requested, but don't really know. I would think that would be the starting point...

I stick with icewm on my netbooks mainly since that was the default. I've tried some other WMs before (fluxbox maybe?) but as I vaguely remember, I always had various niggling little issues that I didn't want to spend time on and ended up back with icewm.
Cheers