Playing with debian testing cli version and am building from ground up. I am falling in love with e17. But I don't know what kind of software to get that won't look completely like a fish out of water in it. Or is that just the way it is with just a wm?

dwm for geeks
fluxbox for a user friendly fast desktop
openbox rocks too

e17 is fancy sure, nice wm More advanced but very cool

The "problem" with E17 is that it uses its own toolkit (EFL) for the applications that comes with it, while almost any third party software either uses the Qt or the GTK toolkits. That simply does not allow a consistent look, you will have to live with that.
Alternatively, don't use E17, but one of the more generic options, like Openbox or Fluxbox and limit yourself to use only applications using one of the toolkits.

I have tried that and the outcome was not very good. After all, what is it worth if an application blends nice into the rest when one using the other toolkit works better for you. I don't care about the look anymore at all, function is more important than form.

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I would look at the list of applications that come bundled with distros like AntiX or LinuxBBQ, as these applications have been carefully selected and tested to work great with minimalist windows managers.

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php
http://www.linuxbbq.org/

If you are interested in tiling window managers (I'm not), I know a fellow who swears by i3.

I like Fluxbox, because I like eye candy. It's really plain out of the box, but can be configured up to look really nice.

Personally, I would consider E17 (which I like so much I'm running it on three machines) to more of a desktop than a WM, what with the desktop gadgets and all.