For the sake of her "they've hacked me" paranoia, my crazy sister made me install OpenBSD on her crappy PC three-four years ago (Intel i3 and a mechanical disk). She stopped using the PC altogether like 6 months after that. It wasn't really bad, everything seemed to work, taking in account the limitations of the hardware. The upgrade procedure irked me, though - mostly, realizing that you have to be reading documentation constantly even for a freaking minor version upgrade.
Still this made me try FreeBSD on my PC, only to realize after a couple days that pkg/pkgsrc are utter shit compared to Portage. Alas Gentoo/BSD is long gone, otherwise I'd love to try it.
I'm with you - I was kind of happy with GNOME2 back in the day, but the forecoming of what was going to be GNOME3 made me jump out that ship and became a refugee in KDE.
It's a shame the Linux ports of Chrome and Firefox are written in GTK because of the reasons you mentioned. Once I heard some guy at GNOME talking about porting Firefox directly to Wayland - which sounds kind of bollocks for a pedestrian like me - but if it's possible, I hope that they succeed and Firefox can become a toolkit-agnostic web browser.
But at the same time I wonder about projects like Xfce and if they ever decide to move away from GTK, like LXDE did. I mean, a fusion between Xfce and Enlightenment would be awesome.