Tried them all. RetroUi has unique features like the Start Menu toolbar in Metro and windowed apps. But besides the cost, it takes a huge amount of memory, in fact more than all other windows services and process combined also including the antivirus/firewall and video/mouse drivers. It's bad programming, resources hogging and margin for buggy design.
ViStart is just awful. Tried to install a couple of crapware, takes about 5 secs for it to load and then discard the Metro screen and, uninstalling it did not revert the changes to the UI.
To cut it short, Classic Shell is the most reliable, smallest, full featured, no bullshit and yes, it does skip Metro - no need for extra software. I only missed an option to disable the silly lock screen on all of them.