There's no contradiction between wanting to use Gnome and wanting to use XMonad....

There's no contradiction between wanting to use Gnome and wanting to use XMonad. Personally, I think I slightly prefer the default Unity experience over Gnome 2, Windows 7, or Max OS - but its hard to customize in the ways I want. However, with a simple

  sudo aptitude install xmonad suckless-tools gnome-session-fallback
  sudo vim /usr/share/gnome-sessions/gnome-classic.session

and change the window manger to xmonad I'm happy as a clam.