When did you try Cinnamon? It used to just be a customisation of Gnome, but is now standalone, which might make it more stable. (Unless that's the thing that made it buggy.)
Again, I'm mainly looking for Gnome-but-better, not interested in Mate/KDE/Xfce, so I'm hoping it has matured/evolved in the right direction.
I want a useful bootable pendrive, with a Debian base.
Might try Knoppix - for some reason I thought it was RedHat-based - otherwise I've found the Debian Derivatives Census which provides others to check out. (Would be nice if they had basic filtering functionality.)
Buried within the Debian download directories (which can't currently be accessed because whoever is doing maintenance doesn't understand what a mirror is), is an unofficial live ISO with cinnamon and the non-free firmware - basically the two reasons for wanting Mint.
I hacked with URLs to find 9.5/Stretch (stable) on a mirror - wanted to try 10/Buster (testing) but looks like the weekly releases are only on the offline official servers - though I still need to find a spare USB drive to put it on.