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Have you tried Cinnamon? It also uses gtk3 but it's a more traditional layout. Cinnamon desktop is my favorite out of the desktops I've tried.

Probably all of the options waste a lot of screen by default. Elementary would be an exception. I was thinking more about just general polish.

I thought Gnome 3 wasted a lot of screen real estate

Fonts are quite large by default. I usually set the font scaling factor to 0.9 with gnome-tweak-tool, this also reduces the size of the top panel.

Since 3.10, the tendency for apps is to save space by placing buttons directly in the window title bars. For example, this is what Nautilus looks like in 3.12:

http://imgur.com/3a4zIfQ