Ah, MATE. The one DE I've never actually tried in my Distrohopping days for whatever reason (there was nothing wrong with it or anything, i just never got around to it before falling in love with XFCE). I'll take your word for it. Heck, maybe I'll tweak this to resemble MATE more if it's really "pretty much Gnome 2"
It's definitely a very well made desktop environment. It's what I started with back in 06-08 when I started using Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a pretty well built mate flavor, as does Linux mint. The Ubuntu mate flavor is a great one to see what's functionally possible with mate. There's a bunch of preconfigured set ups matching various other operating systems and some unique configurations. On my main PC, I'm running garuda xfce, but with bspwm as the window manager. For my laptop, I'm running pretty much the same set up, but with Linux mint Debian edition in xfce/bspwm as well. Your set up is still rad though, I really dig it!
Because at the end of the day it means "hey, developers working on foo, ditch it and move to bar, then try to convince bar devs to allow you to make it more foo-like". And that's for two whole DEs, not just one or two applications.