Yes, as dated as it looks now, it was the first unix desktop that felt 'polished' to me up to that point. It's also the first desktop I had that was in colour though, so maybe that's part of it.
I've used every other wm under the sun and I end up spending more time configuring my damn window manager more than getting work done. So much lost productivity vs just not using them to begin with.
CDE still does one thing that no other wm seems to be able to do: completely consistent behavior everywhere