I have been distro shopping for an alternative to gnome3 for the past few weeks. Tried SalineOS. Some good apps there but a little too fancy and GUIish for me. Gave Mate a spin. I am so over gnome. Tried straight Debian but it is so bloated with stuff I never use. Did a base install of Debian and built it up from scratch. That gets closer but is a lot of work! Refracta is the best of both worlds - a few apps (not all of which I like) but on the whole a very basic install and it's been pretty solid.
Thank heavens there's no Libreoffice bloat! I did install the Libreoffice Writer because Abiword wasn't behaving nicely. It tears during scrolling even with the nvidia driver and no mouse wheel scroll so a little awkward. I don't understand why Brassero. I much prefer xfburn.
gftp, synaptic, gdebi and other useful tools are up and running. And I like that bug reports are provided when installing. But there was no suspend/hibernation or lightdm - had to get that going on my own.
I haven't played with refractasnapshot yet but I think that will be really useful.
Unless I run across something unexpected, it looks likely that I'll be setting things up with refracta when wheezy goes stable. Thanks for making my life a bit easier.