Well, it's almost impossible to avoid personal judgments on this matter. This involves personal taste. But when talking about "new users" or "not-that-advanced users", I'm really suggesting Gnome 3 to be the choice of the project.
I know that its size is bigger than Xfce and it takes more resources, but it represents the evolution of a great desktop environment. And it is (and looks like) "today".
As I said before, we can't deny that a lot of people hate changes. But it's part of the process. Each product, when getting big changes, faces it. Windows 8 is a good example.
I'm saying something that the market is showing us: people don't want to perform magic to make things work these days. They want to press an icon and get that program to work. Furthermore, they're asking developers to narrow differences between platforms.
It's not about Gnome, Xfce or whatever desktop environment being focused only on touchscreen devices or identical to a mobile platform (that would be terrible for everyone), but at least something that doesn't make people think that Debian looks like from last decade and don't support new technologies (although, we all know, none of these being true -- but we have to show it).