I have found that most of the complaints about Gnome-Shell being bloated comes from installing it on top of a desktop running Unity - which has a whole bunch of

I have found that most of the complaints about Gnome-Shell being bloated comes from installing it on top of a desktop running Unity - which has a whole bunch of stuff running in the background. Removing Unity and installing Gnome (which is far more configurable because of http://extensions.gnome.org http://extensions.gnome.org) has turned out to be really lean for me.