ninja'd! by @ironfoot
There's a way to do that but it requires a bunch of packages that are Gnome related and unused for anything but the clock. Not ideal. I know from discussions previously that there was a way to install just the needed packages for function and then configuration needed to be done from dconf-editor, which is again not ideal.
I did the homework on this in a previous thread, you can see it there rather than me rewriting everything already said. Do note the link in that post where Wimpy explains that it is something they are aware of and working on upstream and behind the scenes.
This was just a suggestion on how to possibly workaround the situation until upstream decouples things enough to be useful for our needs in this distro.