Thanks Jaymo, and no worries on the essay. I actually enjoyed reading through it, especially the explanation of why Unity works for you. The HUD and keyboard-centric workflow are definitely compelling reasons. Keyboard-centric is massive for me as well on XFCE.
It also gets into something I’ve been thinking about increasingly: the relationship between a distro vs desktop environment release cadence.
After 2 decades of experimenting with a lot of combinations, I’ve increasingly come to the conclusion that XFCE is probably the sweet spot for people who like bleeding-edge or leading-edge distros but STILL need their workstation to be boringly stable. You can run a very current distro underneath without necessarily making the desktop itself part of the experiment. 
That was actually what led me to write the post about matching Linux distro and desktop cadences.
And, while down that rabbit hole, ending up taking the idea probably way too far and turning it into a game: distrofighter.com lol. From which the pretty serious stats page has confirmed my suspicions: XFCE is one of the largest overlooked yet still mainstream Linux desktop environments:
