> It's always been too buggy, by which I mean, obvious visible UI bugs immediately after installation.

Really? I've installed Mate on ~10 computers, and have never run into UI bugs. I run Mate, my two kids run it on their computer, and I'm sometimes on that one helping them with school related stuff. Never run into UI bugs. I don't doubt that there are such bugs, but in my experience they're pretty rare (unless the project has taken a recent nosedive, always possible in open source).

I've run into some UI bugs using Mint Cinnamon, are you sure you were using Mate and not Cinnamon?

Do you remember what the bugs were? If it's something you can remember, I'll see if I can fix them so that future users don't run into them.