Agreed 100%. As an example, Xfce defaults to (if one doesn't choose an empty panel) a two panel strips model: one in the upper side, one in the lower part of the screen. Now, who is the most likely user of Xfce, which is considered a lightweight desktop manager? I'd say mostly not-so-much-powerful-laptop/netbook or small pc users with no screen estate to waste. Most small laptops have 768 vertical points, and wasting part of them with redundant graphics is a bad choice. On all installation I move all icons from the lower panel to the upper one, delete the lower panel, often set the workspace number to 1 and delete the workspace chooser, add a few launchers (audio, bluetooth where needed etc.), move the upper panel to the bottom, delete the standard menu in favor of the whisker menu, reduce the panel vertical size to 26 pixels and set a dark theme. On some machines I also create some launchers for Rox-Filer windows (shell aside it's absolutely the fastest thing for navigating directories, copying/moving files etc.) pointing to most used directories (Home, Documents, Audio, NAS storage if any, etc). The result is a much more useable desktop although still user friendly and uncluttered.