How is MATE these days? I switched to Xfce when the Gnome 3 debacle hit, and after spending about 10 minutes arranging things to look like Gnome 2, have never looked back.
It's a nice Gnome 2 experience. If you're set up with Xfce there's little reason to switch, but if you want to go Gnome 3 -> Gnome 2 then MATE is the best option imo.
I've just read the wikipedia page and was delighted to find they have a fork of gedit which doesn't hide the menus! That's now installed on my system.
I've been using MATE for several years now. It's very solid and they've improved and modernised it nicely since gnome 2 times.