Desktop Environment Woes

Oh woe is me. I'm starting to get rather tired of a desktop environment that doesn't work very well. All in all, I'd say GNOME is really nice, but lately some things are starting to really bug me. Metacity finally has a feature where newly created windows don't pop up and steal keyboard focus. That feature is nice, and I like the improvements to it in the latest 2.10 release. However, some of the newer technologies that GNOME now relies on are not the greatest; HAL being the application I am thinking of at the moment. In all the months I've used it since GNOME started "requiring" it, HAL has very rarely guessed my CD drive configuration correctly. I have nothing out of the ordinary, just a CD-RW and a DVD-RW, both IDE, plugged into IDE1. The CD-RW is master and the DVD-RW is slave. HAL sees my devices and makes the correct icons in "Computer", but it won't actually mount the devices when I have CD/DVDs in. I can manually mount them, and when I do Nautilus goes "oh hey one of these devices is mounted" and changes the HAL -created devices to appear mounted. So all in all I get 2 devices entered in "Computer" for each mounted optical disk.
All that being said, I'm starting to ponder going back to a distribution like Ubuntu. That distribution seems to be one of the few that can make GNOME appear to "Just Work".
Another possibility I've considered is reverting down to a more minimalist window manager. Or possibly a light-weight desktop environment like XFce. Though XFce has its own set of quirks and blemishes, as well as a few abominations (*cough cough* xffm). I've even thought about trying WindowMaker/GNUStep (*gasp*). I'm not sure how long this ever-so-slight growing annoyance with GNOME will go on. Or what the end result will be. I hope its not that I abandon GNOME; I'll feel lost without it.

Now playing: Jakub Steiner - chillout