You ought to give it another look then. I'd recommend Bodhi Linux, which is an Ubuntu foundation and E17 as desktop. It's stellar. (I'd tried E17 on opensuse and didn't like it as much just because opensuse hadn't packaged it as well). E17 is now "lightweight" compared to Gnome and KDE4 (maybe even KDE3, I don't know). It's super fast even on my Atom notebook, and despite being lightweight provides pretty gorgeous graphics and a very useable desktop. Enlightenment has also gone from being a "very alternative/really OUT there" environment to one that is more traditional (as Gnome3 has gone WAY out there an alienated most of its user base). A couple things I like about it:
(1) Gorgeous graphic effects, but done in a way where the effects are useful/helpful and not just eye candy for the sake of looking fancy.
(2) Very configurable with alternatives that work well on desktops, tablets, notebooks, and with options that would appeal to minimalists, or eye-candy hungry folks. But it comes with sensible defaults.
(3) Very good performance, even on hardware that would be considered low-end by 2013 standards. Again, it flies on my netbook.
(4) Some E17-specific apps, like the Terminology terminal emulator, are very pleasant. I'm not a huge fan of the E file manager, but you can use another one if you like.
(5) A good approach to widgets. They allow you to do the "widgets swoop in on top of your desktop when you request them, and then disappear" thing like OSX. By contrast, I've never understood KDE4's approach to widgets.
I think Enlightenment may have missed the commercial boat, but I'm not sure they care. Rasterman and team seem to be focused on doing interesting things because they're interesting and push the boundaries on how we interact with computers (without going psycho, like Gnome3). I can't comment on the state of libraries or APIs - I'm not a programmer - but I'm sold on Bodhi and E17 as a user/consumer and later today they're both going to get a little money from me for Christmas :)