I've been cheating after years of being a debian purist. I do like lxde and often plain openbox with my custom panel. But in recent times have brought me various frustrations with deb... particularly with resolv.conf acting as it has a mind of its own and vanishing my set of dns collections and replacing them with its believed to be best for me. I tried Manjaro LXDE and it seems rock solid, logical and sensical. The variety of packages is not there, there may be many things you do with debian that may not be able to be done with Manjaro, but for day to day average clean work (apart from system/net maintenance) it is a killer system. There is a bit of a "lack of control" feeling with much of its automation, but lately debian has had some of that feeling as well.
I just get sick and tired of spending hours on .conf.files and then some update of package and they are either gone or obsolete or both. Debian doesn't like us to configure things on our own anymore. Then there are services being turned off and the next time you look they are up and running again. If you have other work to do than to be fiddling and chasing the running system around all day this has become a nightmare. It is like a hunting sport. I suspect many systems are evolving in such complex ways that some of us can not follow anymore. The best thing about manjaro is that it is not ubuntu (which is like Debian in drag without a personality) and I don't dare even look at someone's machine that mentions mint. Ubuntu to me is like a Porsche 914, a VW beatle mascaraded into a sports car. I'll just go with Fiat for now and keep debian as a challenging sport for the weekend. :)
