Especially as it gets worse and worse in GNOME... I want my integrated(!) Enlightenment back... *grin* Really, metacity is a major annoyance at best. Never experienced sawfish (only recently upgraded my desktop machine from RH 6.2 to RH 9 and shortly after to FC1). You can't even set windows to "always on top", switch desktops by hitting the screen border with the mouse pointer, or ALT-Tab cycle windows without metacity drawing windows from other desktops into your current one. *SIGH* And still, it's slower than E on RH 6.2.
I'll agree in general that metacity lacks some of my old favored features (I used to use fvwm). Desktop switching based on hitting the screen edge took a while to get used to, but reducing mouse usage is generally a good thing. I don't usually have much use for setting a window to 'always-on-top', but I can imagine it might be useful in certain cases (and I can't figure out how to make metacity do it).
IIRC, metacity stripped out a lot of that functionality to make it "simpler, friendlier, and smaller". YMMV if it's actually there.
But anyway, getting to my point:
I don't have your problem with using alt-tab or alt-esc. Both cleanly cycle through just the windows from the current desktop. Could it be that you have some older GNOME/metacity settings that weren't cleanly replaced? I've done a few user-upgrades now, and old GNOME settings have commonly proven to be a source of trouble.
