Really? I've played around with GNOME Shell a few times, but recently I've been seriously considering using it for my laptop because I would like to get the most real-estate-optimized modern GUI possible on there.

Right now I'm running Pantheon (elementary project's DE) on one partition and i3 (tiling WM) on another, and neither quite seem to feel right -- the former likely because it's very WIP (granted I'm optimistically biased being a core developer of the project).

What specifically have you found advantageous to your workflow with XFCE? What did you miss from GNOME-Shell, and what exactly made you switch?