To my eye, XFCE in Xubuntu looks a lot better than in ootb Debian. Might want to give that a whirl.
Also you check out tint2, which is a nice 3rd party panel also used in Crunchbang.
Also you check out tint2, which is a nice 3rd party panel also used in Crunchbang.
I don't think XFCE is perfect, but it ticks the important boxes for me. So much so that I just use it out of the box now rather than rolling my own from a vanilla OpenBox install (a fun exercise, btw).