Obviously, you're not the target user of Ubuntu, so there's no point in complaining. Ubuntu is not meant for people who want to edit grub/menu.lst by hand. There are plenty of other distributions for that.
And furthermore, why would I recommend Ubuntu to new users knowing that I'm not going to be able to help them as easily? A bit of an exaggeration right now, but an inevitable result of the path Ubuntu is on. A user friendly distribution should work with existing conventions, not discard them by creating a whole new layer on top.
Since it has such a large share of the Linux desktop market it's easy to find solutions for most of your common Ubuntu problems.
I don't really want to go back to the days when everyone used a different distribution where if you had an obscure problem and used google for a solution you would come to a page describing how to fix it in another distro with a completely different package management system and where the contents of /etc were completely different.
I remember posting questions on the forums of various distributions relating to problems I was having just seeing them go unreplied to in perpetuity.
Benevolent Dictator is what Bill Gates somewhat pretended to be for years.
He made his money selling SSL certificates in large quantities, I don't really think he is a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
He reminds me more of the type of entrepreneur who makes his money then decides to buy an English Football club and run it into the ground.
That's possibly unkind though, there was enough good work going into Ubuntu providing good support and sorting out allot of the common Linux Desktop issues to award him some credit, but I don't really see Ubuntu as any kind of creative juggernaut.
Maybe they are right, and the future of mass computing is in entertainment consumption and not productive work. Maybe the dream of a popular powerful OS is dead. Maybe it's time for power users to return to being a.nich
Shuttleworth started out the same way, except with Linux instead of DOS/Windows, and now he's insisting on making unpopular changes because he thinks he can see the future. Remember when Gates believed there was no future in the Internet?
Anyway, I'm rambling so I'll stop here.