Re: Worth a look
It's a cloudy afternoon so I thought I'd try it. What follows is my personal opinion.
The panel style/layout changes that can be chosen from MATE Tweak are 'interesting' but only to people who pine for Unity or some Mac lookalike. If you're used to standard MATE then they will be of no interest at all to you. Note that you can save the panel style/layout as a named custom setting but this 'saving' does not include the exact contents location and layout and so you will mess up any existing icon layout if you select something different and then try to go back to a saved setting. This is a one-off decision that you should make at an early stage.
MATE 1.18.0 here has exactly the same cosmetic 'glitch' and functionality shortfalls that I've seen in the Linux Mint version.
It has some new themes - woohoo.
I'll wait for the LTS in 18.04 then see if they've fixed the MATE problems.