It has come a long way, and version 1.4 does bring back some of the good old functionality like drag and drop from the menu to the panel back.
Right clicking on the menu will give several options including alacarte for editing the menu.
The hotcorner will now take you to the a workspace manager:
Instead of to the smartphone look icons in Gnome3 (Many love them, but hardcore Linuxers hate them).
You can now drag icons directly from the menu to your panel and right-click the menu and edit it with alacarte. In short it is getting closer to the Gnome2 flexibility.
You can put your panel at the top or at the bottom or both. You can set the panel in edit mode and drag the elements:
And you can put the hot-corner in any corner.
But Cinnamon has an annoying delay on the menu; the first time you start it it can take a long time before it reacts. This is a good alternative for Gnome3 shell.
