Wow, a lot of GNOME 3 bashing...You might want to try using the Clearwaita (Clearlooks) theme which has GTK+v2 and GTK+v3.
I'm using Trisquel 5.5 (and I have Xfce installed) and it works fine. Clearlooks: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Clearlooks-Phenix?action=content&content=145210
