Cinnamon absolutely is fantastic, and I 100% agree that it gets out of the way really well.
I'm curious what you needed to do that GNOME was fighting you. I'm not invalidating it, I'm genuinely just curious, since I haven't used a Linux system for personal/work use for about 5 years now, so my ideas of GNOME/KDE/etc. are almost certainly dated. To clarify: vanilla GNOME is kind of awful, and I've always wondered if anyone genuinely uses it stock while also being aware that extensions exist.