Give KDE a try. Gnome has steadily dumbed down and removed features; KDE is delightfully customizeable and very, very polished in current form.

This. After the KDE 4 debacle, I gave up on KDE because they cut all the functionality I relied on. However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how functional the newer KDE5/Plasma desktop is, especially once you change a handful of really ugly defaults (mouse cursors, window switcher and a couple other similar things)

That, imho, is the major boat anchor holding KDE down: the ugly defaults. If they would take a moment to apply tasteful default settings it would make a huge difference in the marketing value.

In the end, though, KDE is "just like Linux" in the philosophy of "you don't like it? change it!"

Out of the box, though, KDE Neon or Magneia are nice enough. The new Breeze theme is much better than Oxygen. What concerns me a lot more is that major features like Activities don’t “just work” on major Linux distributions (e.g. on Debian testing, on my desktop, trying to create a new activity just sort of hangs and causes a daemon’s cpu usage to spike to 100%

Interesting conundrum, with KDE I'm fighting the abundance of features not to break things but with GNOME I'm fighting the absence of features in order to make it productive.