I use XMonad but used to have lots of Gnome based services running in the background, in order to have sensible "modern" plug-and-play and easy configurability (e.g. printers, monitor layout, network, etc.) Sadly, as they move more and more things to the Shell, this is becoming a harder task. gnome-control-center which used to be very useful even in my custom setup, is now useless if you don't run a full gnome-session or gnome-shell. My setup has become a Frankenstein of pieces of, xmonad, taffybar, suckless, Xfce4 and Gnome.

But I don't blame them, since I understand that their goal is to provide a sensible and consistent user interface for general users and that I am a total exception :-)