I then decided to try to put something together from scratch to understand it better, so I ended up rolling my own debian/virtualbox/pfSense/i3 environment, link in my profile to my blog describing how I set things up.
This of course is for sure NOT as secure as Qubes, but for basic browsing and development (no 3d/gaming) seems good enough for me, it also was fun putting it together and has been working fairly well over the year or so I have been running it.
This said I am glad Qubes development is ongoing and will likely look into running it again at some point.