@tiox I can't understand what you mean by "GNOME 2 (and MATE) do the whole grid thing just fine". Shouldn't grid mean that desktop icons are kept in equal distances and in alignment? Here's an image with Keep Aligned enabled (it doesn't seem so aligned) 
Unchecking and checking again the Keep Aligned option (this should be called a bug because no one should need to check and recheck one option to take effect) does it a bit better, but it is still bad, because grid should mean equal distances (both vertically and horizontial) on all desktop icons in a way that the name of the files doesn't get covered (that means bigger distances and/or show partial name of files when they are not selected):
On the contrary xfce (at least the latest 4.12 version) keeps all the desktop icons equally distanced and aligned really beautifully.