[jitl]

Some people don’t want to mess around with Linux to that degree. The OP said he wanted a seamless base system; he can always “fall back” to vanilla gnome if the customizations break somehow. With a custom desktop environment I always kept Gnome installed anyways “just in case”.

[bstar77]

That's fine, but you will gain that time back after the initial setup is done. Pretty soon you will be fighting the system rather than it working for you.

The point where Gnome tends to go to shit is when installing the new major/minor update.