Individual GNOME utilities are fine, but the GNOME 3 environment as a whole was a flop for me. The tight coupling (try removing separate GNOME tools on Debian, it forces you to get rid of a ton of other libraries and then suggest to autoremove the entire set, including the display manager) and finally mandatory systemd integration were the last straws.

I haven't used a DE in a while, though. A basic composite/tiling WM is enough. Anything else is superfluous, although I do enjoy Xfce.