In my experience, Cinnamon is the best of the current desktop environments. I never got used to the GNOME 3 Shell, no matter how many times I tried using it. Mate was too much work to configure the way I wanted. LXDE requires too much use of the command line because it lacks things. XFCE was OK, but Cinnamon was better and it required very little tweaking.
I prefer Debian stable + backports because it offers all the major desktop environments and it never breaks anything. All I really care about is having a recent version of Firefox and LibreOffice, which is possible with backports.