MATE on Debian provides most of the decent "modern" gnome2 experience it always has. There are some problems with file chooser dialogs and the like due to feature removals in the underlying GNOME gtk3 libs but overall it's very usable.
Additionally, the old type-ahead complete was removed from filename-entry. Arch at least has a patch set to put this back, but the location-mode thing is resistant to fixing. I changed the default initialization with a simple patch to gtkfilechooserwidget.c but it only works for the first time I File->Open in a gtk3 application. The second reverts back to pathbar.