Salvation. Take thy mouse clicks back! Here's a short article and tutorial introducing Dash to Dock, a Gnome Shell extension that provides panel-like dock behavior instead of the default Activities and overview functionality. Welcome to the revolution. http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3-dash.html Cheers, Mrk
Thanks Mrk. My solution is to use the Fallback session instead. You get something quite similar to Gnome 2.
I direct your attention to Lightning Linux - an Ubuntu based distro with a modified GNOME 3 environment that includes a standard bottom panel and menu launcher. Its a virtual clone of GNOME 2. In OpenSUSE, there's something similar with with OpenSUSE SLE session, although I've not been able to resize D2D to work with the bottom panel.