I was actually a fan of Gnome Shell until I went to the LinuxCon 2011 and started talking to the devs. It seems to me that they are trying to turn Gnome into something meant for beginning users while trying to train them with "good" habits. Example: shutdown can only be achieved by holding alt (without gnome-tweak). Considering I have limited power when I'm mobile, I usually shutdown (bootup time is negligible compared to standby power-loss on my netbook).

That being said, I've switched to Cinnamon and haven't looked back: http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/