Gnome for its looks, simplicity and intuitive ways, but after Plasma 6 release, KDE seems to be up par with Gnome's UI/UX so at the moment Plasma ia my favourite desktop.
As for WMs I tried i3, Sway, and Hyprland. Overall Hyprland is my favourite because of its special workspace mechanics, customization and options. But if looks had no value to you and you like Sway's scratchpad mechanic then sway is for you (plus its documentation is mostly clearer, better organized and well written than Hyprland). Btw I am not comparing their tiling because there are use cases for each person and you can acomplish each others tiling mode with plugins.