I should say that I actually like quite a bit about GNOME. I'm even a fan of mutter and GNOME shell (especially with gtile). I just wish I could decouple it from the rest of GNOME.

I run xmonad at the moment. The learning curve is huge if you don't know Haskell. It took me ages to get it set up and working. But after I learned Haskell, it's really very nice.