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In between, I tried alternative shells like litestep/bblean, but I didn't like the UI at all.
I decided interface was more important than looks, and kept the win7 taskbar and search, which is a far sight better than navigating overly pretentious and annoying bblean menus to open a single program.
I went with a less boring look and also put the taskbar on the left to increase the vertical space my screen had for displaying code, etc.