Ubuntu :: Finding 11.04 Unity Desktop Alternative?

Having been totally happy with Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10 but after a recent fresh install of 11.04 I find myself extremely stressed out with the desk top.I absolutely hate the unity desktop. It's flakey, unreliable, with random mouseclick issues, random application crashes and poor performance both in the increased time it now takes me to navigate to the apps that I want to fire up and in terms of really slow rendering of menus.It's awkward to start up multiple apps (I typically have my IDE, eMail client, browser, ssh terminals to remote servers and at least one terminal running at any one time)

I use my system as a serious development platform and I have come to the conclusion that 11.04 in it's default configuration format (and also with the classic log in being just as flakey) has to go. It's costing me too much in lost development time.So I'm faced with a decision, move back to using 10.10, stick with 11.04 but find a very much better desktop alternative to unity (and I don't mean the classic log in options as already explained) or I ditch Ubuntu in favour of an alternative distribution.