>>13
I have no trouble with letting XMonad being my tab manager (if you don't like it, you can use awesome, dwm, wmii etc etc). Also there are at least two implementations of tabs that work on recent versions of GNU Emacs. I have tried one of them, but then removed it because it was superfluous.
get a mess of 12 buffers
IDO existed for ages, and I can switch between buffers in a fraction of a second by typing a unique part of their name. This is a non-problem for me, and never was, in 6 years or so of using Emacs for most of my programming (both personal and at work). My colleague, also a emacser, has hundreds of buffers (he works on a much larger project with hundreds of files). He has no more trouble navigating between them than I do.