Ubuntu is just one of the many distros derived from Debian; some apps even share the same repositories. If you're familiar with the apt package manager you could jump straight back to Debian without noticing much differences, although you may have to spend some time to configure your desktop manager of choice (XFCE for example defaults to absolutely ugly settings). On Debian you can choose among Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Mate, LXDE, ... during install but any of them plus others can be installed afterwards, and if you change the desktop manager after installing applications, that won't be a problems since all will inherit the applications menu and some other customizations. The user can also use a different desktop manager at each login, but that integration is true also for any other Linux distro.
If you don't care about changing package manager, however, I've found Manjaro to be really clean and easy to set up. It appears to have "a bit less knobs" than Debian, but they do their work nicely: very good for desktop applications.
I've been using Linux Mint since Ubuntu became a bit of a mess. Well worth a look.
If you're ever interested in trying it out again, the MATE desktop environment is an up to date fork of Gnome 2. Most distros should have a version available with it. I believe ubuntu has one.
Yes, Gnome 3 sent me running... But I realized the problem is Ubuntu and Gnome, and there are many other choices.
It might be worth your time to try `xubuntu-desktop`. Like my sibling comment says, it's not pretty, but it is highly functional and avoids the Gnome-esque candy to which you allude.