Enter GNOME Do. Everyone had been talking about it a few months back, but I didn't jump on the bandwagon... until now. I dispensed with Do's normal interface (a mid-screen popup) and opted for Do's Docky, a pretty powerful and eye-pleasing panel.
Gnome Do, unfortunately, was not the first piece of software that I tried. I tried Kiba Dock, which was acceptable, but not quite what I wanted. I then moved on to Avant Window Navigator which looked pretty much perfect—until I really started to use it, and all of the bugs started showing themselves. I also tried Cairo Dock, which just seemed to try too hard to be eye candy while sacrificing usability. Simdock seemed like a decent choice, but ultimately rendered pretty poorly and was not very configurable.
While not necessarily docks, I figured that desklets might be a good thing to try. I started with adesklets, which was pretty good for eye candy, but bad if you hate getting errors for each desklet. But if you really hate getting errors, don't even think about trying gDesklets, which is easily one of the worst applications I have had the honor of trying; you'll find yourself sifting through hundreds of nearly identical desklets, which are mostly useless (unless you want a hamster in every square inch of your desktop) and mostly broken (lots of errors, some which won't go away).
In the end, Do's Docky offers great usability (especially since I am a big fan of keyboard shortcuts), great eye candy, and enough configuration options to make me happy. Now if only they would fix bug 316978 rather than just get rid of the option...
