I haven't used GNOME in years..
I would recommend that you continue to use KDE.
I've been using GNOME3 fulltime for a few weeks, and still can't get used to it. Also the amount of settings removed that allow for tweaking is just incredible. The killer one for me, was removal of the DPI setting.
On the netbook, I use 72dpi, but GNOME3 insisted on 96dpi, making all fonts and text too large. The only way to fix it, was to use overrides at the X11 level (eg, modify your xorg.conf to manually set the dpi). And all the other items that broke from my normal workflow, made doing anything more time consuming.
Took about 45mins to get XFCE working how I needed, but most of that time was just going through the settings applet, and setting the settings I wanted.