I have been using, and was very happy with, Fedora/Gnome for many years (since day one in fact).   It did everything well and was  stable, with steady incremental development.  There was no reason to look elsewhere.
Until F15/Gnome 3 that is. What a disaster! even the fallback mode.

I  quickly moved to Mint with Gnome 2.32 (a good distro, but its not fedora) while investigating other options.  Now I have installed the Fedora 16/Xfce spin on my machines.  (The fact that xfce is good enough for Linus was a factor!).

Wow!  Wow!  I should have changed to xfce years ago!  Its very very fast, does everything I need, and does some things
better than Gnome 2 IMHO.  My older athlon xp box is now snappy and responsive like my Core i7/SSD.

Thunar,  xfburn, parole, terminal etc are all well designed, lightweight and productive.  I love odd features like being able to configure terminal with terminalrc (configure it once and copy the file around).  The custom date format in the date plugin is genius (once I realised it was strftime).

I am very happy having now found a perfect DE again, I can just hope and pray the developers wont get itchy fingers and succumb to the bloat and radical change that has ruined Gnome and KDE!

Brilliant desktop - my thanks to all those who produced it.