I used to be really into theming. But now, the default Breeze and Adwaita look good enough that I haven't bothered wanting to change them in a couple years.
That and thmes always appeared to be some degree of "broken" that I just don't bother anymore.
I do always change the cursor to the black Adwaita one, even on KDE. It just feels right to me.
When I did still use themes, Numix, Arc Dark, and whatever "flat" themes that I could find were my favorites.
Yeah, I'd personally try out a live CD for a different distro (probably Puppy) to see how the events show up there.
I do wholeheartedly recommend changing distros though