I'm so sad to say this is looking worse for every release. And by looking, I mean looking. I'm starting to think this is going to be just as unbearingly ugly as the current iterations of GNOME and KDE in a few versions. It might be getting more functional, but I don't know.

Xfce was the option I was so happy to have. It used to be a no frills, minimalistic (but not conceptually minimalistic) interface that simply did the job. Now the interface is getting more complicated and innovative. More complicated designs requires better designers, and they don't seem to be around except for in the Elementary OS community.

I haven't looked into MATE yet, perhaps I'll do that.