Most likely what broke it was not installing KDE, but uninstalling GNOME. A DE is a huge and complicated piece of software, and it vomits dotfiles all over your ~ the first time its run, making a huge mess.
It's something that I really hate about the apparent freedom Linux gives me to change my DE. I can't DE hop because installing any DE will lead to a shitton of packages to be spewed out by installing a single package, but it won't ever work the other way, even when choosing to remove unused ones.
It's also what makes me interested in TWM's like i3, because Linux at it's core is just a CLI OS, the GUI stuff is slapped on top of it, I don't really need a full graphical suite, just a workspace to run software of choice on, and the idea of my desktop being used for using windows and nothing more is very compelling.
My current Windows desktop setup is very basic, there are some Rainmeter widgets on the second monitor, and a taskbar with no start menu button that I would get rid of if I had an alternative way to access the system tray icons, so if I were to move to Linux I'd see myself just manually installing X11, i3 and going from there. It's easy to do and it fits my idea of an OS being just a place to run my software and do nothing more.
Unfortunately I use software that doesn't have a good Linux counterpart, and I don't want to deal with relearning everything for Linux, so I'll still be dealing with Windows since I know how to get it to where I want it to be. But for dual booting or a secondary machine, yeah I can see myself doing that. Maybe I'll reinstall Linux on my tinker ThinkPad again to switch from Mint to Debian and do just that someday.
My only real issue is that I don't know any good CLI alternatives for the usual GUI elements like sound mixer, network management and things like that. I'd be fine with it being a CLI interface, as long as it's more like nano in usability and not vi if that makes sense, and it'll replace the need of learning a bajillion commands to do basic shit.