Edit: Regarding Evince, there's Atril. It's the GTK+2 evince fork from the mate developers.
Regarding deadbeef, yeah, it was mentioned mostly on emotional basis. I had some troubles building gtk2 plugin on my home machine, good chances that it was problem with inconsistent building environment, yet no problems with building simple gtk2 apps or deadbeef gtk3 plugin. I haven't dug deeply though. At work, I just use slightly older deadbeef version with gtk2 plugin :)
If you need help with building deadbeef, just visit us in IRC (#deadbeefplayer in freenode) and we'll help you. There are also portable builds available, those should work on any distro.