I personally using Mate because it just works. Mate is not just a fork of GNOME2, it's a continuation of GNOME2. There are plenty of reasons why I prefer Mate over GNOME but the main one is because Mate just takes care of accessibility and do what I expect to have on my computer.I guess Debian's defaults are the defaults for a reason. Here I thought Gnome (Gnome 3) would have fewer bugs than Mate, a fork of Gnome 2.