Or Fedora. Or if you like tweaking things, Arch or Gentoo. Or to become more knowledgeable, a BSD.
I think part of what is happening here is that some number of people who got started in Ubuntu, as their first non-Windows OS, take it for granted (thus get outraged at change) but now feel the 'growing pains' of someone who wants to get more technical. Since their heads aren't where they were when they started with Ubuntu, it isn't as suitable for them any more.
I switched to Ubuntu coming from Debian (and some Gentoo) because I was at the point where I needed my system to be productive instead of spending all day tweaking it.
Canonical has done great things to make Ubuntu Just Work. It works great out of the box under most virtualization solutions. It's also one of the only distros that has done away with most font bugs in Linux, for example. At least Linux Mint DE still has many of those - I tried it briefly after the Ubuntu 11.10 debacle.
The outrage is there because Canonical is actively breaking workflows that used to work, in other words, forcing users to spend time tweaking their system instead of being productive. That's a recipe for disaster and user outrage. Just ask the Firefox devs :-)
I think part of what is happening here is that some number of people who got started in Ubuntu, as their first non-Windows OS, take it for granted (thus get outraged at change) but now feel the 'growing pains' of someone who wants to get more technical. Since their heads aren't where they were when they started with Ubuntu, it isn't as suitable for them any more.