Agree with you XFCE in Xubuntu. I just can't force myself to like Unity, stock Debian is ugly, and LXDE on Lubuntu looks flat out terrible on my 1080p monitors. Just a smeary blue and silver mess.

I don't think XFCE is perfect, but it ticks the important boxes for me. So much so that I just use it out of the box now rather than rolling my own from a vanilla OpenBox install (a fun exercise, btw).