I agree that GNOME and Unity have jumped the shark — I think that I started to notice when GNOME got rid of xscreensaver and replaced it with a screen-blanker,

I agree that GNOME and Unity have jumped the shark — I think that I started to notice when GNOME got rid of xscreensaver and replaced it with a screen-blanker, with an unfulfilled promise of adding screensavers back someday, c.f. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-March/msg00340.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-March/...). Meanwhile everything went down the path of compositing and otherwise burning way too much CPU to do not a whole lot extra. I switched over to a tiling WM years ago, and have been extremely happy since. It does exactly what I want; I can connect to a running instance with my editor and reconfigure it, as well rewrite it while it's running. It's pretty great.