I use Gnome3 but with Cinnamon simply because its one of the few ways to be both using a newer desktop environment and have an experience (after a little bit of moving things around) that looks like what I am used to, like and want. I love tablet UIs... on my tablet. I realize designers/developers of UIs want the elegance of one UI paradigm to rule them all, but content production on a desktop and content consumption on a mobile devices are not at all alike.
I tried Cinnamon for a while and I was very happy with it... except for its performance; it is quite slow; I recently went back to Gnome Classic, and although it is not as nice as Cinnamon, it is much faster.
When I was using it I used to notice a slight delay on some actions (maximizing a window, doing alt-tab, opening the task bar, etc.), that I never had on Gnome Classic.
It must be said, however, Cinnamon is really nice.
At second thought, I noticed this until I disabled desktop effects, you might want to make sure that wasn't the delay you noticed as that delay is configurable and artificial.
