The Pharisee paints the tax collector as evil, but the pharisee is the bad guy in this story. Literally the next two verses:
13 But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to raise his eyes toward heaven, but was beating his chest, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other one; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Disclaimer: I’ve used tiling window managers for all of 30 minutes in my life.
If you just want a faster cinnamon, you might consider merely switching to XFCE. Just change the menu to the whisker menu and you’ll be right at home.
WMs don’t typically come with “sane defaults” in the DE sense of the word; you have to make your own sanity. In order to find sane defaults, you’ll probably have to switch to a distro that has its own custom configs. (That being said, you can always copy the configs back to your original distro when you know what you want.) Maybe check out Mabox for some inspiration. I can’t speak to any other beginner WM distros.