Well to be honest, you're not completely wrong. elementary OS _is_ trying to make as much decisions as possible for the user - To make it "just work". I agree that this is annoying to people accustomed to tweaking their system or desktop. No doubt. elementary OS is - at least partially - targetted at people with minimal technical knowledge. And there _are_ some design decisions I might not really agree with. The minize button, well, uhh ... I didn't get it back via elementary-tweaks on my machines, but I understand people missing and re-activating it.

Now here's the thing though: There's a different between Apple's walled-garden and elementary OS. You are very much able to tweak your elementary OS setup in any way you want. It's Linux after all. It's your system. We try to discourage tweaking a newcomer's system via commands learned on a blog post because they're old, outdated or plain wrong / bad. elementary-tweaks was not maintained at all for a long time as well. And there are quite a bit customizability options out there hidden in dconf. That's what elementary-tweaks is a frontend to after all, basically.

I understand it's a bit frustrating to not see the customizability in a Linux distribution you're used to from others. You're not exactly the target audience for elementary OS and I'm sorry for that.

And to be honest, there's another spin to it: More customizability means more features maintained in the source code. And quite frankly, sometimes we're really short of developers (I'm not contributing anything at all currently as I'm kind of busy with my apprenticeship). If nobody is going to maintain a new feature, it's not going to be in the code because it will break one fine day and it's adding work to the "to-fix" list.