I have never quite understood all these desktop emotions. I run Kubuntu, but almost never interact with any desktop features. What is it in your workflow that requires you to interact with Gnome/Unity? (just curious)
The main thing that springs to mind is that the only way to get a half decent desktop is through extensions. I installed a whole load of useful ones about a year ago, but currently only about 1/5th of them are still working due to gnome version incompatibility.
One of the most noticably broken parts of Gnome Shell for me is that my Pidgin notifications/alerts seem to be broken. They neither flash the item in the taskbar, nor give me a popup to let me know that a new message has arrived. I had an extension to fix this, but that has since broken upon Gnome version change. There is a messenger integration into the user account menu in the top right, but there is no way of changing the client from the default to Pidgin.
I only use Gnome on my travel laptop, so I get little snapshot peeks at how it's going. I've had these problems I've mentioned for quite a while now (and many more besides), it only seems to be getting worse. The Gnome devs seem to be completely ignoring the community and charging off down their own path of weird unusability.
For my main desktop I just run AwesomeWM, which is almost completely pain-free and gets the hell out of my way.
alt+tab. Used to work perfectly. Now broken. I've returned to debian stable, which comes with a gnome-2 legacy option that works out of the box just as well as it did a decade ago.
Go to [0], install, configure to either "all windows" or "all windows in current workspace", and alt+tab probably works like you want again. It's not terribly difficult.
