layout-machi VS awesomewm-machina

You can also take a look at layout-machi. It's pretty powerful and I think it can solve your problem.

You'll need dynamic layout with state to do that. You can achieve this with some coding. I recommend to look on (layout-machi)[https://github.com/xinhaoyuan/layout-machi] (nested layouts) and dynamite. They do not provide the feature you want, but it's quite close since they allow you to combine layouts.

I don't know why you would want less productive behavior than a Dynamic Tiled Window Manager, but Layout-Machi can do that

For a proper manual tiling layout, https://github.com/xinhaoyuan/layout-machi would be the closest, I guess. But I think that's still somewhat limited to a grid.

What exactly are tabbed layouts? I've never used i3 but when I looked it up it seemed like this module does essentially the same thing. Layout machi can be used to manually create layouts. I haven't used it yet but I've seen a lot of cool features.

I don't know if there is such a thing, but the closest thing I can think of is layout machi. It allows you to manually divide the screen in different areas on-the-fly, for instance you could divide the screen in two sections, the left one would be the biggest and the right one would include different areas on top of each other like in a master and stack. Once you created the layuot, each new window will occupy only one of the areas, leaving empty the remaining space. However (at least at my knowledge) it doesn't provide automatic window positioning like in a classic master and stack, meaning that every time you open a new window you'll need to manually move it on the desired area, so I don't know if this can be useful for you. In any case it would allow you to have only half of the screen occupied by a single window, keeping a certain level of tiling properties. Moreover it's possible that this layout has some features which I'm not aware of that would allow you to better meet your needs.