I did that for a while, but ultimately got too frustrated due to a few things:

• Having to explore extensions in the first place for fairly basic functionally that I would have expected gnome to naturally implement
• Every update would break extensions, and I'd have to wait for the extension author to update it, and about a fourth of the time the extension was abandoned and I would just have to go without or search for a similar.
• At their best I always felt a lot of the extensions were having to settle for a lesser experience due to limitations of the extension mechanism.

Ultimately, I found that experience I was trying to get to that gnome never would normally support and would evaporate on updates and never be quite right anyway was just a natural featureset of Plasma. So I just do that and haven't had to sweat updates nearly as much as when I kept trying to make a go of it with gnome shell. I kept giving it a shot because of my gnome 2 experience (admittedly augmented by compiz), but gnome 3/mutter have not been a good fit for me.