Enlightenment was never supposed to be aesthetically minimal, quite the contrary in fact. When every other WM still had flat menu bars and Windows 95 style start menu's, Enlightenment was full of chrome, graphical effects and elaborate theming facilities. It was really a showcase for making your desktop look good, with minimal hardware requirements.

Indeed.. i remember when i was so proud to have a nice looking desktop manager with really old hardware running, it was awesome.

Nowadays i am not sure.. i will try E17 again and see how it compares today :)

(p.s.: i even did a screencast of my "wunderful" E17 Desktop 5 years ago and it still has effects and a look and feel that is ahead of gnome/unity/xfce with a laptop that was over 5 years old back then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lOa8o1tgIU )

Oh my, I'd almost forgotten about all the gold. Lot's of excessive shimmering too.

It's clearly a technically very impressive desktop environment, but I always thought they needed better design for the actual themes.

That's why i used the black alternative scheme, that was muuuuch better. :)