Look and feel are subjective. Nobody has a totally average temperament. Use cases will play a large part in your choice of hardware and the amount of customization that makes you happy:
- If you are always running from USB sticks, or from live DVD disks, it is probably best to use the Gnome 3 desktop, as it has been tested the most by developers, or the Xfce desktop, because it uses the least resources
- If you are installing into VMs, you might want to use the Xfce or LXDE desktop environments, because VMs tend to have low resource levels
- If you are loading to a dedicated server or laptop, you may have the highest resource levels, and you are unlikely to blow the OS away very often, so choose the E17 or KDE desktops ...