Is there anything better than gnome-session-fallback aka Classic Gnome?

It sounds very much like you're describing Xfce. I think it's a perfect successor for Gnome 2, because in many regards, it's very similar, except it works the way it's intended to. It has panels, very similar to the panels in Gnome 2 and they even support most Gnome Panel applets and Indicators. Xfce4-panel also allows you to have different panels on different screens, which is very nice. Xfce is also a little less demanding of the computer than Gnome 2 was.

LXDE is also very nice. It's quite a bit faster than Xfce, but also a little simpler. I'd say it's something similar to the plain UI in Windows. The LXpanel does not support Gnome Panel applets, but it does support indicators, though I think you'll have to install a plugin for it.

LXDE and Xfce are both complete desktop environments, but you can install only their panels separately if you wish: they're called lxpanel and xfce4-panel, respectively, and you can run them with Unity if you wish.

I found useful to install avant-window-navigator. there are not too many applets but my desktop works some what close to gnome2. Here is the link I used for this: How do I get rid of all the Unity bars?.

After playing around with various stuff, I ended up with installing XFCE on Ubuntu 11.10 and replacing XFWM with Compiz (and gnome-wm for decorations) and Thunar with Nautilus for a better file manager/desktop handler. The result feels pretty much the same as my old 10.04 Gnome setup. Just configuration of themes and stuff is a bit messy now as each of them has their own way of config (dconf, gconf, xfconf, ccsm...).