Is that Mint screenshot the Mate or Cinnamon DE? Last time I used Mint was about 3 years ago and it looked nice than that. I'm not an expert on Linux DEs, but that looks like what I remember of Gnome.

But anyway, agree with your points in general. I'll probably end up installing ElementaryOS in a VM. I do VR development full-time so I will need Windows as my main computer, but I definitely like having a Linux system around for everything else I do.