I liked Unity - they were doing so much customization to Gnome that it made sense for them to have their own DE.
almost every time Ubuntu goes off and does its own thing, not including the rest of the Linux community in its decisions, it ends up designing stuff that never gets adopted
This is something I like about Debian… They don’t make changes unless it’s really necessary. I run it on all my servers, except an Unraid server. Network config is still in /etc/network/interfaces
in the same format it was in 20 years ago. When they adopted systemd, they still had full backwards compatibility with SysV init, and even today I think you can still uninstall systemd. It just keeps working.