Hacker News Reader

Well, guh. The point of those DEs is too be highly customisable. Although, I agree that they should be more appealing out of the box.

Gnome-anything is far from customizable. If you don't count hacking it by editing XMLs and javascripts (for gnome-shell).

Did I say Gnome? Most Linux users know this. KDE, XFCE, LXCE are what you want if you need customisable UI.