In order to get the panel to stick to the bottom of the screen in Xfce, I had to edit the panel's XML file in ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/ and change a value= from "x=0;y=0" to "x=0;y=1054". There's no way to do this AFAICT from a GUI. So yeah, it's much faster to build Xfce than it