Wait, you don't have to use the Ximian packages. That's exactly what KDE and others are doing for years now.
Distributions are responsible for packaging.
As somebody noticed for himself, and so for me, Gnome 1.2 was near the right balance between ease of configurability and unobtrusivness. But this is just to me. I don't get it. It's the same application as before, you can use ANY balsa package. Please give me some examples.