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.
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.)
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.