Now on GNOME3, and it's better than I thought it would be
So I went ahead and took the plunge and upgraded to GNOME3. My experience has actually not been that bad so far. I did have to upgrade to the latest git version of Orca, because the Mozilla products appear inaccessible to the version of Orca that ships with GNOME. I also have no desktop for some reason in the “fallback” mode, and I can add the main menu applet to my pannel, but I can’t make it completely replace the menu bar in the top left corner that activates when I press alt-f1. However, all these problems are pretty much just minor annoyances to me, since everything else seems to work at least as well as before the upgrade, and I didn’t really use the desktop launchers and icons that much anyway. The desktop will probably become more of a problem when I plug in my mp3 player, but since it shows up in /media, I shouldn’t have a problem with that either. I’m sure I’ll find more bugs, but I’m actually fairly happy with my upgrade decision overall.