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All the issues you named are KDE issues. I don't want to start a war here but Gnome 3 has really matured since its botched initial release and plays nice with KDE applications (but maybe that's due to Qt being great). I'm not trying to convince you to switch (KDE does have points in its favour, too!), but Gnome 3 is a sound recommendation for new users and causes very few issues.

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Gnome does indeed look better out of the box, but I am not in favour of installing extensions for customization. This is something that KDE shines at, with loads of options to tweak appearance and behaviour. XFCE and other tiling managers, I've tried briefly but I always find myself reverting back to Plasma desktop. Without a unifying force behind Linux desktop (Freedesktop helped to some degree), I have come to accept that things will always be shaky in desktopland - the price of freedom of choice.

Yup, the extensions are annoying, but luckily many are packaged, at least in Debian. I have one to get sane Alt-Tab behaviour, a media player indicator, a weather extension (in the middle of the top bar, next to the clock), one to get a suspend button, and another one to arrange my workspaces in a grid. Of those, only the last one isn't part of the gnome-shell-extension* packages. It's annoying to have to use a "tweak tool" to manage this stuff.

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