That depends where you want to go with your system, but Unity seems to be one of the most obnoxious Desktop Environments when trying to get it to look different

That depends where you want to go with your system, but Unity seems to be one of the most obnoxious Desktop Environments when trying to get it to look different from its default-look. Apart from that, if you're going to replace most of the DE-functionality with dedicated components anyways, you'll want to start out with a more minimal DE, if possible, for the sake of resource usage.