When Ubuntu first came along, I was a Linux user, and I tried Ubuntu on a few different occasions, but I never liked it mostly for the same reasons why people seem to be complaining. It just felt like eye candies tacked onto Debian. There are many other good distributions that are geared toward power users. Why are so many complaining?
Well, as a developer I got over wanting to tune everything about 10 years ago. I want things to mostly just work, and Ubuntu does that for the most part.
I've yet to run into any situation where using Ubuntu has constrained me in any way vs. using another Linux distribution (and I've used a bunch of different ones over the years).
The main reason I use Ubuntu over vanilla Debian for my desktop is lack of polish. It's not that I can't use it, but Ubuntu adds more polish, and what it takes away is stuff I don't notice because I don't tweak my desktop or laptop much anymore.
For the most part my "tweaks" consists of a git repo of my dot-files, and I rarely run more than a couple of full screen browser windows and a bunch of full screened terminal windows.
It seemed too bloated for me, so I switched to Arch Linux and dwm for my windowing. I hardly have to reach over to touch the mouse now and I feel like I control my own computer.
I use arch and I never can't find a 'reasonable' package in pacman. If I'm installing something weird or proprietary (e.g., Skype) I just get it from the arch unsupported repo, which is just as easy using a tool called packer. I've never come across something I wanted that I couldn't get from one of those sources.
I'd say if anything it's better than apt-get since the packages are updated so often!
When Ubuntu first came along, I was a Linux user, and I tried Ubuntu on a few different occasions, but I never liked it mostly for the same reasons why people seem to be complaining. It just felt like eye candies tacked onto Debian. There are many other good distributions that are geared toward power users. Why are so many complaining?