I've started experimenting with the Cinnamon desktop, and find it quite tolerable with some modifications. This repo is mainly a convenience for synchronizing all my machines on a single consistent look, and backing up my thematic modifications.
In addition to the customized elements in this repo, I'm currently using unmodified versions of Mint-Numix-Blue (for Controls and Window Borders) and Adwaita (for Mouse Pointer).
The Mangala theme is a modified version of the basic Cinnamon theme, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version. My changes are released under the same license. See https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon.
The Paper icon set by Sam Hewitt is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. My changes are released under the same license. See http://snwh.org/paper.
To install, copy the contents of the themes/ directory to ~/.themes and copy the contents of the icons/ directory to ~/.icons. If you already have the Themes settings window open, you'll have to close and re-open it for the new themes to appear.