Yes, Cinnamon is a wonderful effort -- already packaged for Debian as well but the packages are not ready for the archive just yet. Longer-term, it's likely to survive Mate unless Gnome fully implodes and Mate becomes the dominant fork (the way the Gnomes are going, this is no longer out of the question). I encourage people to try it. I'm not yet sure what my desktop on next major upgrade will be, but I'm definitely leaning towards Cinnamon.