I felt that Mint's defaults were the problem rather than the solution, but personal tastes do vary.

Is it really that hard to run 'sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop'? Am I missing something here?

xubuntu isn't really a perfect replacement for gnome2 for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere here.

After installing Ubuntu 11.10 I spent the best part of a day setting up my desktop and getting it to a stage with Xfce which I felt was 'only slightly more crap than my experience with 10.10'