Well, I installed Windows 8 RTM on my Acer Netbook today (upgraded from Windows 7 Pro) and spent a while figuring out how to get rid of Metro entirely, not even moving the cursor to the corners will activate anything with Modern UI (Metro) now!
I kept my Win 7 installation and installed Win 8 on its own partition, but I couldn't update from the Release preview to the RTM, meaning I had to do a clean install and not keep anything. Oh well!!! You're right about "don't call it Metro anymore" being unresponsive and a pain to use/get rid of. It really is a cumbersome, frustrating and patience testing POS. Thank goodness for 3rd party ingenuity.
Like you, I found Classic Shell to be the best of the apps to disable metro and place a start button/menu on the taskbar, Though I hope Start8 gets a bit more love and eventually meets our needs. In addition to Classic Shell, though, I use WinStep Xtreme, which provides a ready made start button and menu in NextStart that gives you access to everything the standard Windows one does and more. I use both because Winstep does not exterminate Metro as yet, though I hope Jorge considers it for future builds/updates.
I still haven't installed everything I'd like in the RTM, but the programs I have installed went in flawlessly and function as advertised, so it is a good OS in that respect. Moreover, it installed ALL my device drivers without a hitch, something that Win 7 promised but didn't deliver... I still had to manually install my soundcard drivers and some drivers from the motherboard.
Another thing I like better in Win 8 than 7 in the UAC. It seems nowhere near as intrusive or persistent in Win 8 it takes just one click to give permissions... unlike in Vista and 7, where in most cases it took two. Unlike in Vista and Win 7, when I couldn't wait to install the Tweak apps to reduce/eradicate its presence, I don't feel as bothered by it in Win 8.
All in all, once you get past "don't call it Metro anymore", Win 8 is a pretty good OS. It's just a shame that MS forces us to use 3rd party apps to make it that way. For mine it should be good straight out of the box [with Metro as optional] and not be dependent on 3rd parties to make it functional. Instead of busying itself with Start8 to make Win 8 usable, Stardock could be focusing on the elements of ObjectDesktop, etc, but no, it is doing Microsoft's job of making an OS functional instead.