I keep hearing about all the cool, dynamic things you can do with KDE, but the Gnome UI looks more consistent and polished. KDE has just seemed thrown together

I keep hearing about all the cool, dynamic things you can do with KDE, but the Gnome UI looks more consistent and polished. KDE has just seemed thrown together. However, my needs are minimal. I spend all my time inside large applications or in the terminal. So I just need a simple window manager, terminal app, and occasionally a file browser. I was frustrated when Gnome paired down their UI. On the programming side (via Perl and Python), I never liked GTK and have always preferred Qt.