I like the idea of focusing on one window at a time with keyboard shortcuts for getting around quickly.
I feel like the only predictable workflows are when I'm cycling through N windows repeatedly. Tabbing works great for N=2 already due to reorganizing the list so the first element is always the previous window. But N=3 or 4 and maybe 5 are also common for me and kind of annoying with tabbing. Of course I don't know how predictable those are either, they're annoying to tab because the patterns are almost regular but also have frequent exceptions.
I am sorta talking myself into wanting normal tabbing alongside a browser style forward/back (which would NOT reorder the alt/cmd tab list). That way once I have my N windows as most recent, it's all back/forward navigation and the path to each window is something I would remember for the session.
I switched to a tiling manager (I use Hyprland). There are no floating windows, I have multiple spaces I can easily switch to and if I need to temporarily switch a window to full screen it's really easy. Because of that I don't spend any time at all looking for the window I want.
For me, Alt + Tab was always almost good enough. I find the shortcut itself to be a good experience but as you said, it's annoying tabbing through the window list. The idea with Smart Switcher is that you wouldn't need to override too often so it ends up being less keystrokes then tabbing through the window list.