@aral I have not, and probably won't in the near future, but I can say this:
Installer to get a working fully-encrypted system with my preferred DE was trivial and fully GUI'ed. Time to a working system with the software I wanted and configured the way I like was ~15 minutes after that.
I'm sure there's a lot of power i'm not yet taking advantage of, but time and effort to get started is essentially zero.