100% agreed. Although I'm still having a hard time with Alt-~ (Mac-style "switch windows" not apps), I'm very happy with Gnome 3. The number of keystrokes and inches of mouse travel have been greatly reduced over Gnome 2.
The lack of a Start-like menu was initially off-putting, but I've grown to appreciate the lack of that bit of complexity. 99% of the time I run: Chrome, terminal(s), Skype, Pidgin and WebStorm/PyCharm, so I don't need to fiddle with settings or wonder about where in a menu an application resides. When I do need to find an app, the action button and search are perfect.
The only thing I miss in Gnome 3 are the many taskbar plugins that show mem/processor usage, but those will come. Otherwise, Gnome 3 does a great job getting out of my way while I do my work.
I think this is currently a big missed opportunity for Gnome 3. The ability to extend the shell using JS is huge and the project has done a terrible job publicizing it. I was just googling around for it and had fairly hard time finding good, official docs on how to build an extension... If they dialed that in and got the GitHub crowd excited, they'd have a vibrant community in little time.
EDIT: Wow. The one click install from Chrome and auto activation is really nice. I clicked the link, approved the extension install (system dialog) and, BOOM!, pretty charts and graphs!
lg is much more than just a data inspector, it's a full-blown REPL. The fact that you can jump in and interactively eval code directly in the running process is huge and opens things up to a whole new level of hackability.
Does it do focus-follows-mouse (AKA, sloppy focus) right?
EDIT: I'm speaking from my experience with Unity, where you could enable sloppy focus with the gconf-editor, but it caused various kinds of wigging out and wonkiness with Unity (probably why there's no easy way to enable sloppy focus).
I tried gnome 3 for a few minutes once, and got the feeling it would probably have similar problems with focus-follows-mouse, and that's probably why there's no easy way to enable it there either.
I use focus follows mouse and it works pretty great. There are a few circumstances where Openbox's focus follows mouse mode is more finely tuned (for instance, when un-maximizing a window, the window under the cursor receives focus instead of keeping it on the window that you just unmaximized); overall it works really well.
One thing the gnome3 guys are doing is putting application menu stuff up in the task bar (window-specific menus will remain in the app window), but when focus-follows-mouse is enabled, the app-menu will remain in the menu-bar instead of up in the panel.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "right" way, but it doesn't do focus-follows-mouse by default, I don't think. You can use Gnome Tweak Tool (https://live.gnome.org/GnomeTweakTool/) to enable it, though.
The lack of a Start-like menu was initially off-putting, but I've grown to appreciate the lack of that bit of complexity. 99% of the time I run: Chrome, terminal(s), Skype, Pidgin and WebStorm/PyCharm, so I don't need to fiddle with settings or wonder about where in a menu an application resides. When I do need to find an app, the action button and search are perfect.
The only thing I miss in Gnome 3 are the many taskbar plugins that show mem/processor usage, but those will come. Otherwise, Gnome 3 does a great job getting out of my way while I do my work.