Do give KDE a try. I recently helped a friend migrate from Windows 10 to KDE. I have personally been using i3, XFCE and GNOME back and forth during the last decade, and the one time I tried KDE a few years back, it did not boot to desktop so I just switched back to GNOME.

After helping my friend setting up KDE I discovered the level of polish and customizability that KDE now offers. That same day I installed KDE on my own machine and soon after removed every GNOME component from my system. I have been using it the last few weeks and really feel at home!

Yeah, I was a Gnome user for past years ago along with Fedora. And I share the same Greg K.H feeling about that such big change called Gnome 3 that honestly I was not able to track it at all from UI perspective on a Fedora machine at that time. They together never convinced me for my daily job. In the other hand, KDE has evolved without that big major difference like Gnome 3 and now with Plasma 5 we have a very polished interface with great performance resulting is a pleasant experience on my daily basis. Basically now with ArchLinux + KDE on my laptop I have everything that I want as developer: an OS performing and booting at high speed (around 10 secs the whole OS + desktop env) and a great desktop experience. Such experience that you can not afford it using Windows or "even" Macos.

That's Linux empowering your computer. So that simple.

> I'll have to try KDE again, I always found it really messy and disorganised (but that was many years ago).

This was my reason for not using KDE for years. The UI these days is cleaner and leaner, rivaling XFCE in resource usage.

> I still find Gnome to be the most usable and aesthetically pleasing desktop by far.

This was my initial impression, as well. But if you want to do something that the GNOME team feels is superfluous, you're either out of luck or depending on some plugin that will break your DE if you upgrade GNOME.

On Plasma Desktop, almost everything is configurable, but it isn't overwhelming and disorganized like it was in KDE 3 & 4. There's a considerable amount of polish. Plugin bugs don't take down the entire desktop environment, either.

Have you tried Cinnamon? I would recommend Mint for trying it, you can install newer Kernel via Update Manager there.

Mint is great and I recommend it too for using Cinnamon but it's not remotely the only viable choice to try it out. Cinnamon works just fine in Debian/Devuan, and in Fedora, from my experience.

It still is tbh.