I really like Gnome 3 for its look and feel. In fact I've been using Gnome since at least version 1.2, when it came with Enlightenment for a window manager. However after recent update to Fedora 22 I've found several things in it to be just too annoying. Namely, sometimes it starts to use 100% of one of CPU cores, sometimes extensions get spontaneously unloaded, some extensions are never being updated for current Gnome versions, GDM is always running, etc. All these things compelled me to switch to something lighter and less complex.
I've already been using xfce4-panel in a sidebar mode along with Gnome Shell, so XFCE was the natural place for me to move. Here I tried to recreate familiar environment which resulted in the following layout:
top running in gnome-terminal and Midnight Commander with xoria256 theme running in xterm
( another couple of screenshots and a bunch of patches )
All in all, I'm quite pleased with the results. Here's the before picture (running Gnome 3) for comparison:
gnome-shell with similar customizations
It's not a whole lot different from the after version but that was the whole point.