Hey
Me use of linux is always been on a debian based system and normally installing via ubuntu
i like to experiment with the desktop environment and this is a place i have often had trouble. linux mint cinnamon always look bad even that is me preferred desktop look so far, but me laptop that i normally use to Linux refuse to install it
so in the end i look for a debian based system that not have to much bugs when installing new desktop environments on it
What i think you are trying to say is that each time you install another distro other than ubuntu it does not work or look good.
so my recommendation is to look in some winodw managers but you will have to do some reading
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/window_manager
or
if you just want a simple Debian based distro i recommend crunchbang
Well if we are talking about best debian base, debian is the best, I personally consider Ubuntu and Mint shocking compared to the all mighty debian, although its packages are stale as hell.
If we are talking about looks, its all subjective, I agree with Squishy, Crunchbang looks superb in its minimal way, I personally like something like BSPWM, I like its look combined with the terminal, but for GUI based ones, I generally like XFCE4, KDE5 and LXDE, I refuse to use GNOME due to its size, when I use Linux for my self, I want a lean specific system for the usage, extra packages annoy me lol.
So yeah, experiment, the managers not working seems to be an issue with either the install or maybe X, I would say GPU driver, but I some how very much doubt it, if your getting thrown into tty3 (Black terminal screen) then its an issue with the service not starting, if you can, post any errors :)
I used to hate gnome, but these days it's my favorite DE. After you install a few extension (particularly shellshape which makes it tiling) and get knee-deep in the configuration files, it's not bad at all. Sure, it's not extremely light on memory (compared to a simple window manager like awesome), but not as heavy as KDE4 either.