"The Gnome 2 versions of Trisquel were some of the best looking out there"
You can say that again! Trisquel 4 was my favorite, and we can achieve the same look again with MATE easily, while with Gnome fallback it just keep getting trickier.
"As for Magic's issue with ConsoleKit, I'm sure it can be resolved in a future MATE release if its important."
I hope they come up with a solution that satisfied people who don't like systemd. Then everyone is happy.
