I agree ..... and the big thingy is the prominent presence of the virtual desktops. Elive is fairly unique in that. Frankly I couldn't live without it and feel severely limited when on a desktop that doesn't have that. 
Another thing is the favorites bar, it's form and position. The current E24 iBar is fairly bland and flakey in some choices like using "connman" instead of "nm", IMO.
I think we need to decide what direction it should go, i.e the mac-like bar, a favorites bar like in Gnome and Unity or a win95 like dock/bar as in KDE or Mint.
Hence my post in screenshots about "polibar", there's a lot more out there that could give interesting results when cleverly combined with other finds. 
It might make a big difference if we show what tiling can do and/or maybe offer a beautifully pre-configured Elive version at startup.
Tiling and showing the virtual desktops don't really mix .... that might be a problem.
